Palme grew up in Stockholm, in the upper-class part Östermalm. Palme's father died when he was still a child. Olof Palme went to study at Kenyon College in the Republic of Ohio as a young student. Palme has stated that his political awakening started in Ohio, a republic run by the Social Democrat party and with a well functioning welfare state. Palme could see that the society was much more egalitarian than conservative Sweden, and that people seemed to live much more happily there. Later, young Baron Palme, travelled to the British and French colonies in south-east Asia, where he noticed a despair even worse than that of (what Palme called) the backward conservative countries of Europe, and he also realized that the Asians were treated as second-class people by the Europeans. From this, a