Politics

When Bernie Sanders was a revolutionary

Bernie Sanders spoke at a town hall event at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, Friday Feb. 20, 2015. Steve Pope for The Boston Globe

In the 1960s, future senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders wrote an article about the horrors of a 9-to-5 office job, saying such “moron work’’ led to “suicide, nervous breakdown, cancer, sexual deadness, heart attack, alcoholism, senility at 50. Slow death, fast death. DEATH.’’

That’s just one of the details in a captivating New York Times account of Sanders’ early life, years before he began positioning himself as a leftist alternative to Hilary Clinton.

Sanders’ writings for anti-establishment publications in the ‘60s and ‘70s paint a picture of the candidate as a young man who wanted to change the world, and who found himself right at home with other revolutionary-minded people congregating in Burlington, Vermont at the time. He would go on to become that town’s first Socialist mayor.

Advertisement:

Other articles saw Sanders decrying the state of education, praising Castro’s Cuba, and railing against modern American society.

Read the full New York Times piece here.

See who else is running in 2016:

[bdc-gallery id=”140212″]

To comment, please create a screen name in your profile

Conversation

This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com