Bigger Than Bernie. Micah Uetricht
first read the works of German socialists like Marx, Engels, and Karl Kautsky when he was imprisoned for his role in organizing a strike. Thereafter, he devoted himself to the cause not just of unionism, but of socialism.
Debs ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket five times—at his most successful in 1912, he won 6 percent of the popular vote. But Debs was steadfast in his belief that the task of the Socialist Party was not merely to win votes. It was to awaken the American working class and create an independent electoral expression of class struggle happening on the ground. “I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out,” Debs said—a sentiment echoed in Sanders’s campaign slogan “Not Me, Us” over a century later. Victory for workers would remain elusive unless workers organized themselves.
In 1918, Debs was arrested for speaking out against World War I. The country had been whipped into a pro-war hysteria, and federal authorities charged him with intending to “cause and incite insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny and refusal of duty in the military,” and for trying “to obstruct the recruiting and enlistment service of the United States.” He knew that his antiwar agitation would likely result in his imprisonment, but he did it anyway, telling a crowd gathered in Canton, Ohio, “The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.”
Debs ran for president for a final time from behind bars in 1920, receiving, incredibly, over nine hundred thousand votes. But his incarceration delivered a blow to his health from which he never recovered. He died a few years later, in 1926.
For nearly a century, no American socialist has proven as popular a leader as Debs—not until Sanders began his first campaign for president in 2015. Debs was an important inspiration for Sanders, not just because of Debs’s socialist politics, but because of the way he communicated them. Debs’s biographer Nick Salvatore writes that he “remains the classic example of an indigenous American radical. He was not born a Socialist, and he did not reject American values when he became one.” Sanders, too, would speak about socialism in distinctly American tones, combatting the widespread notion that socialism is an exclusively foreign concept that could never take root in American soil—while also remaining critical of the role of the United States in perpetuating war and inequality around the world.
Shortly before Sanders was born, another burst of labor militancy kicked off. During the Great Depression, workers struck in enormous numbers. In 1934, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Toledo, Ohio, all saw massive general strikes, while autoworkers in Flint, Michigan, famously sat down on the job and occupied their factories a few years later. This period led to the explosive growth of the labor movement. Communists, socialists, and other leftists played key roles in these fights. And elected socialists were still around too— including one, Vito Marcantonio, who was representing East Harlem in Congress at the very moment Bernie Sanders was born a few miles away in Brooklyn.
That explosion of working-class organizing was the impetus behind President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, the massive (and at times contradictory) project that remade American life in the 1930s and vastly improved the material well-being of millions of people throughout the country. Socialists and Communists would play key roles in every aspect of the New Deal, from organizing the working-class upheavals that spurred Roosevelt to pass pro-worker legislation to even working in some of the newly created New Deal agencies under Roosevelt. While Jim Crow white supremacy, sexism, and other oppressions weren’t ended by the New Deal, and some of the new labor reforms actually helped tame expressions of working-class militancy, the New Deal would become an important reference point for Sanders’s own politics over half a century later—showing, at the very least, that it was possible to undertake a massive mobilization to extend social rights at the federal level.
Sanders was born while Roosevelt was still president, on September 8, 1941, in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish parents. His father had immigrated from Poland, and his mother’s parents were from Poland and Russia. The family was not impoverished, but money was a constant struggle for his paint salesman father and the entire Sanders household. “It wasn’t a question of putting food on the table. It was a question of arguing about whether you buy this or whether you buy that,” Sanders recollects. “I remember a great argument about drapes—whether we could afford them.”
Sanders has contrasted his upbringing in a rent-controlled apartment to that of Donald Trump, who is roughly his same age and also grew up in New York City. “I did not have a mom and dad who gave me millions of dollars to build luxury skyscrapers and casinos and country clubs,” he has said. “But I had something more valuable: I had the role model of a father who had unbelievable courage in journeying across an ocean, with no money in his pocket and not knowing a word of English.”
Sanders’s father had left Poland in 1921. “He came to escape the crushing poverty that existed in his community,” Sanders explains, “and to escape widespread antisemitism. Needless to say I would not be with you today if he had not made that trip from Poland because virtually his entire family there was wiped out by the Nazis.”
Bernie grew up in a milieu that was given to left-wing politics. His parents weren’t radicals—more like New Deal Democrats, who according to Bernie’s brother, Larry, “understood that the government could do good things.” But many Jewish European immigrants were radicals, playing key roles in the labor movement and in the Communist and Socialist parties and other radical organizations in the first half of the twentieth century. Those immigrants’ children and grandchildren often went on to play a sizable role in radical politics in the century’s second half. When McCarthyism and the Red Scare kicked off not long after Sanders’s birth, many reds who were expelled from the labor movement and blacklisted from the entertainment industry were descendants of Jewish immigrants.
Sanders’s mother died when she was forty-six after a difficult bout of illness. This experience was Sanders’s first brush with the intrusion of financial worry into people’s most private, painful moments, leading eventually to his embrace of national health insurance. As a New York Times reporter writes, “As his mother’s health declined and his family struggled to pay for medical treatment, he was spending more time attending to her than in classes at Brooklyn College, suffering through what his brother called ‘a wrecked year’ leading to her death.” After that year, Sanders transferred from Brooklyn College to the University of Chicago. His father died almost immediately thereafter, in 1962.
Newly parentless, Sanders found his footing in Chicago just as the student and civil rights movements took center stage in the country’s politics. Student activists like him were important drivers of the upsurges of the sixties, joining the civil rights movement’s efforts to win voting rights and end Jim Crow, and fighting the Vietnam War. Bernie was “radicalized by the grinding poverty he saw for the first time in places such as the city’s South Side.” He later described his time in Chicago as “the major period of intellectual ferment in my life.”
Sanders joined the civil rights movement in Chicago. In 1962, as the president of his college’s chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), he led a sit-in at the University of Chicago. For thirteen days, student members of CORE occupied the university president’s office to demand the school end its policy of housing segregation in the off-campus buildings it owned. The administration agreed to create a committee to look into the issue, but according to Sanders at the time, this was not sufficient to resolve “an intolerable situation when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments.” CORE continued to pressure the university, picketing its buildings that refused to rent to African Americans.
In 1963, the University of Chicago finally gave in and ended its racist housing policy. But the struggles for racial justice in Chicago weren’t over. Months later, Sanders joined a protest against racist education policies in Chicago. Starved of public investment, crowded black schools were being supplied with temporary trailers to use as classrooms. Sanders went to protest the installation of these trailers and was arrested on the spot, his legs chained to those of black protesters. He was taken to jail, and bailed out by the NAACP. His arrest was captured by a photographer for the Chicago Sun-Times, his face in a grimace as police drag him away from the protest.
Later