Current Fellows
Senator Birch Bayh
Senior Fellow, C.V. Starr Center
Raised on his family’s farm in western Indiana, Birch Bayh initially set his sights on a career in agriculture. But thanks to some fortuitous encouragement from a mentor, he decided – reluctantly at first – to attend college, and then, after service in the U.S. Army, law school, and then to enter political life. While still in his late twenties, he was simultaneously finishing law school, running the family farm, and serving as Speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives – and just a few years later, in 1962, he was elected to the United States Senate, leading a dynamic grassroots campaign that narrowly unseated an incumbent who was nearly twice his age.
Senator Bayh arrived in Washington at a moment when America was on the brink of crisis and change – but luckily it was also a moment when, thanks to John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, a spirit of youthfulness, energy, and innovation was at the forefront of our political life. Despite coming from an often conservative state, one where the Ku Klux Klan was still a force in local politics, he stepped into the vanguard of efforts to secure civil rights for African-Americans, helping to draft the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. Later, as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he led the successful efforts to defeat President Nixon’s nominations of two segregationist judges – Clement Haynesworth and Harrold Carswell – to the Supreme Court. As a result, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights would eventually honor Senator Bayh with their highest award for “his unyielding dedication to human equality and civil freedom.” (He also won a coveted spot on Richard Milhous Nixon’s famous “enemies list.”)
Meanwhile, Senator Bayh also won renown as an expert on the U.S. Constitution. After the assassination of President Kennedy, he drafted the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, which established the rules for presidential and vice-presidential succession. In the midst of the Vietnam War, he authored the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 – and which, at the stroke of a pen, enfranchised 11 million young Americans, who previously had been considered old enough to die for their country but not old enough to vote for their president. With its passage, Senator Bayh became the only American since the Founding Fathers to draft more than one Amendment to the Constitution.
Senator Bayh’s next effort, the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have enshrined constitutional equality for women, narrowly failed ratification by the states. However, he was still determined to advance women’s rights. At a time when institutionalized gender discrimination was still rampant at American colleges and universities, he wrote and passed the renowned Title IX of the Higher Education Act, which for the first time prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex in the classroom and on the athletic field, protecting both students and faculty. (Just a few months ago, the NCAA recognized this achievement, as well his lifelong support of college athletics, by presenting Senator Bayh with its prestigious Gerald R. Ford Award, which he shared with the legendary Indiana basketball coach Johnny Wooden.)
Among his many other achievements in the Senate: as chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, he authored the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FISA, which is currently in the news because it protects American citizens from eavesdropping by the federal government.
Since leaving the Senate in 1981, Senator Bayh has continued to fight for the principles he championed there – for example, by serving as founding chairman of the Institute Against Prejudice and Violence, which laid the original groundwork for federal and state hate-crimes bills that eventually became law nationwide.He is a partner at one of Washington's most distinguished law firms, Venable LLP, where among other efforts he is currently helping to broker an agreement for the sharing of peaceful nuclear technology between the United States and India.
(abridged from Sen. Bayh’s introduction
at
Washington College, January 30, 2006)
Separation of Church and State in Principle and Politics
Birch Bayh:
What Leadership
Ought
to Look Like
Marla Miller
Patrick Henry Writing Fellow, C.V. Starr Center
Marla Miller, director of the Public History Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has taken up residence at Washington College for the 2009-10 academic year as the Starr Center’s Patrick Henry Writing Fellow.
While in residence, Miller plans to complete a groundbreaking biography of the famed flag-maker Betsy Ross. Despite Ross’s iconic status, her life has been so deeply intertwined with myth that no scholar has ever before attempted to separate fact from fiction. Miller, an expert on colonial seamstresses, has unearthed new sources that shed light on the very real Ross and her world. Tracing Ross’s long and eventful life, she has reconstructed the diverse ways ordinary working-class Philadelphians experienced the American Revolution, and the contributions of female artisans to the war effort.
In addition to her book, to be published by Henry Holt, Miller is helping to organize an exhibition at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, based on her research and set to open in the fall of 2010. She also hopes to write two children’s books on Ross, one a biography and the other a fictional account based on the life of an African American child in her household.
An Associate Professor of History at UMass Amherst, Miller is a former member of the editorial board of The Public Historian, and has recently been named inaugural editor of the Public History in Historical Perspective series, launched by University of Massachusetts Press in 2009.
Miller’s first book, The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), received rave reviews. The historian Gloria Main called it “remarkably close to perfect,” and the Journal of American History lauded it for “reshaping our understanding of women’s place in the developing Atlantic world.” Winner of the Millia Davenport Prize from the Costume Society of America, the book grew out of Miller’s 1997 doctoral thesis, which was awarded the Organization of American Historians’ Lerner-Scott Prize for the Best Dissertation in Women’s History. She is a previous recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Winterthur Museum.
