27
I think that is a very strong impact. He
doesn’t need other people’s approval.
He is used to being an independent
because of all that.” As an origin story,
it offers another way of looking at the
Senator’s record as the longest- serving
independent in congressional history.
“And so he’s alone, right?” Jane contin-
ued. “Think about that. He’s alone in the
world. He’s at University of Chicago. He’s
spending most of his time in the stacks,
rather than in class, reading about every-
thing.” Among the books Sanders found
were those of Debs, the Socialist leader
about whom he would later make a doc-
umentary. It was at this time, orphaned
and at a distance from his brother—who
had introduced Bernie to serious reading
and, he has written, “opened my eyes to
a world of ideas that I otherwise would
never have seen”—that the future Sena-
tor became interested in civil rights. He
joined the campus chapter of the Con-
gress of Racial Equality and helped lead
a sit-in against university administrators
for discriminating against black students
in off-campus housing.
He became so consumed by activ-
ism that a dean, seeing his low grades,
suggested he take time off. “He’s not a
partyer,” Jane said. “No drugs and no al-
cohol. He was not into that, so that college
experience at that particular moment in
his life, I think really formed the founda-
tion of his life’s work.”I asked Jane if she thought her husband
had ever processed that string of losses.
“I don’t think he bothered to process it at
the time,” she said. “I think that they both
escaped it.” Later on, she said, both broth-
ers grappled with the pain and meaning
of their parents’ lives—assisted by a 2013
trip they took to Poland with their wives.
I asked Jane whether Bernie’s early
pursuit of justice could be seen as a way of
coping with loss. “I don’t know,” she said.
“I think at that point in our lives, no matter
who we are, we’re searching for ourselves.
And if our entire family at that same time
is gone, you have nothing to lean on. So
I think the search becomes more impor-
tant and more dramatic.” Deserted at that
time by love—warm, messy, emotional,
individual—Sanders found justice—Sanders in Warren, Mich., during his
spring tour of battleground states