Ours to Fight For

"When Rockwell mentioned his idea to Saturday Evening Post editors, they readily approved the project—Rockwell was their star cover artist. Only after the magazine published the pictures did the Washington propagandists catch on. The Office of War Information, by now being infiltrated by image-savvy, 'Mad Men'-style advertising executives, arranged a 1943-'44 national tour for the paintings, which raised almost $133 million in war bonds. Millions of reprints appeared everywhere—inside taxicabs, on milk bottles and stuffed inside Americans' monthly bank statements, for starters. When the traveling paintings reached a new city, parades shook the streets."

Abigail Tucker at Smithsonian looks back to Norman Rockwell's "Four Freedoms" paintings.

"Hell, Half the Kids Who Hang Out There Are Straight Edge"

"It isn't a household name like the now-defunct CBGB in New York City, and it doesn't get the same recognition in the punk rock history books as a spot like 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley. But 242 Main Street is special in its own way: Nearly 30 years after opening its doors, it is now one of the longest running all-ages music venue in the country, beginning as an offbeat government-funded effort to overturn a draconian city ban on live music that resulted in the transformation of an old administrative building into the municipal youth center that exists to this day.

"The leader of that effort, and the person perhaps most responsible for the founding of 242 Main, was Jane O'Meara Sanders, the director of the Mayor's Youth Office who later became the president of Burlington College and now serves as a commissioner for the Vermont Economic Development Authority. As for the mayor who was partly responsible for this DIY, youth-run venue that played host to bands like Fugazi and opened the same month that Husker Du released Candy Apple Grey: It was her husband, Bernie Sanders, now a Vermont Senator and Democratic candidate for president in 2016."

 

In serendipity with "Berned in D.C.," Paul Blest in Vice explains "How Bernie Sanders Shaped the Northeast Punk Scene."

"The Purest Socialist in Mainstream American Politics Was No Longer Pure Enough"

"But it wasn't good enough, he said, because of Sanders’s choice of tactics: He was running as a Democrat. Which meant that he could lose and deliver his voters to Hillary Clinton, a mainstream Democrat with ties to Wall Street and big business. Deliver them to the system they all wanted to defeat.

"'Warts and all, the [Sanders] campaign has a lot going for them,' Ramey said. 'But the Democratic Party is not a wart.' It is a fatal flaw, he said."

David A. Fahrenthold in The Washington Post visits socialists in Vermont who won't support Bernie Sanders.

"This Grotesque Level of Inequality Is Immoral"

"As some of you know, I was born in a far-away land called Brooklyn, New York.  My father came to this country from Poland without a penny in his pocket and without much of an education.  My mother graduated high school in New York City.  My father worked for almost his entire life as a paint salesman and we were solidly lower-middle class.  My parents, brother and I lived in a small rent-controlled apartment.  My mother's dream was to move out of that apartment into a home of our own.  She died young and her dream was never fulfilled.  As a kid I learned, in many, many ways, what lack of money means to a family.  That's a lesson I have never forgotten.
"I have seen the promise of America in my own life.  My parents would have never dreamed that their son would be a U.S. Senator, let alone run for president.  But for too many of our fellow Americans, the dream of progress and opportunity is being denied by the grind of an economy that funnels all the wealth to the top."


The Burlington Free Press prints Sen. Bernie Sanders's speech announcing his presidential campaign.

Saturday Night Vermont Dogtown

The New York Times reports the deaths of skateboarder Jay Adams, former senator Jim Jeffords, announcer Don Pardo, and yoga teacher B. K. S. Iyengar.

"A Tale of Greed, Legal Chaos, and Corrupt Business Practices"

"Just how these contests over land play into the Revolution is one of the most debated questions in American history. In 1909, historian Carl Becker argued that the American Revolution was not so much about home rule as 'who should rule at home.' The struggle for independence, in other words, centered less on exalted principles than on the quest for political and economic power by provincial elites. Popular among muckraking classes during the age of Robber Barons, this interpretation was hard to reconcile with a patriotic account of the nation's founding and eventually fell out of favor.
"So Randall is stuck between a rock and a hard place, interpretatively speaking. He wants to connect the Vermont insurrection to 'a greater cause,' to make it the first battle of the American Revolution. And perhaps it was. But if so, does it turn Allen and his Green Mountain Boys into patriots, as Randall would have it? Or does it turn the leaders of the Revolution into bandits, seizing an entire continent for personal gain and dressing the crime up with pretty words?"

François Furstenberg in Slate reviews Willard Sterne Randall's Ethan Allen: His Life and Times.