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Vermont’s largest unions—the first time in memory that an active trade unionist had run for office.
    But as is often the case for small third parties, we were not attracting new members, new energy, or new leadership. Virtually all party responsibilities continued to rest with a handful of dedicated activists—including me. Enough was enough. My political career was over. With politics behind me, I set out to make a living and began building, reasonably successfully, a small business in educational filmstrips. I wrote, produced, and sold filmstrips on New England history for elementary schools and high schools. It was a lot of fun. In the process, I improved my writing skills and learned something about photography, marketing, and door-to-door salesmanship. I also met a lot of fine educators around Vermont.
    In 1979, after discovering that the vast majority of college students I spoke to had never heard of Eugene Victor Debs, I produced a thirty-minute video on his life and ideas. Debs was the founder of the American Socialist Party and six-time candidate for president. During his lifetime, Debs had a profound impact on American politics and the lives of American workers. Many of his ideas about trade unionism laid the foundation for the growth of the CIO in the 1930s and ’40s. The Debs video was sold and rented to colleges throughout the country, and we also managed to get it on public television in Vermont. Folkways Records also produced the soundtrack of the video as a record.
    Debs died in 1926, but his vision and the example of his life still resonate today. Unfortunately, his ideas remain sufficiently dangerous for them not to be widely taught in schools or discussed in the mass media. He fought to achieve a truly democratic society in which working people, not big money, would control the economic and political life of the nation. He founded the American Railway Union and led a bitter strike against some of the most powerful forces in the country. He believed in international worker solidarity and spent years in jail for his opposition to World War I. In 1920, while in jail for opposing that war, he ran for president—receiving close to one million votes. Eugene Victor Debs remains a hero of mine. A plaque commemorating him hangs on the wall in my Washington office.
    Although I now had a business career, in an important sense my political work had not ceased. I was educating people, not from a podium or in a radio interview, but by resurrecting the heroes of our nation’s political past. The Debs video was a success, and I was now beginning to think about a video series on other American radicals—Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Paul Robeson, and other extraordinary Americans who most young people have never heard of. For better or worse, my media production career came to end in 1980.
    But forward now to 1996, when aspects of the campaign are worrying me deeply, and getting me depressed. Too many questions are unanswered, and there are too many loose ends.
    How do we relate to Vermont Democrats? In Congress, I chair the fifty-two-member House Progressive Caucus, which has fifty-one Democrats and me, people with whom I have an excellent relationship. But things are different in Vermont, where, among others, Governor Howard Dean is a moderate-to-conservative Democrat.
    How do we relate to President Clinton, who is rapidly moving to the right? Should we establish links with his Vermont campaign? How should I respond to the Ralph Nader presidential campaign? Nader is a personal friend and an exemplary progressive, and his supporters have asked me to endorse his candidacy.
    What should the progressive movement in Vermont do for this campaign? In addition to my own race for reelection, should we put up a full slate of candidates for office? Should we at least run a candidate for governor?
    In Burlington, Progressives have won seven out of the last eight mayoral elections. I was mayor from 1981 to