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)
Fredrika Teute
C.V. Starr Center Fellow 2007–2008
Fredrika J. Teute has taken up residence at the Center to write a book on early national Washington D.C. and will be teaching a course on the subject in the spring semester at Washington College. "The Spectacle of Washington" revolves around the formation of a continental political community to support the federal government. The story unfolds from the perspective of a participant, Margaret Bayard Smith, involved in constituting a governing elite both through her activities and her writings about them. Coming of age during the 1790s, she was deeply invested in an expansive republican vision that had moral as well as political dimensions, and she used her pen to project a critical view back to the society she helped construct. Using Smith's literary contributions, the artistic production in the nation's capital, social commentary, and politics, "The Spectacle of Washington" assesses the expectations and limitations of American society in the early nineteenth century and its dynamic legacy for the antebellum era.
Teute's career as a historical editor spans almost four decades and has encompassed a range of scholarly editing and writing, primarily in the early national era of American history. After completing a B.A. at Radcliffe College and a combined M.A. and editorial apprenticeship program at the College of William and Mary and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, she served as an editor on the multivolume documentary project The Papers of James Madison at the University of Virginia. She went on to The Johns Hopkins University to earn her Ph.D. in American history, writing a dissertation on landlessness and politics in postrevolutionary frontier Kentucky. As editor of publications at the Virginia Historical Society, she published the quarterly journal the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. She has also worked on several other documentary editions, The Papers of William Thornton and The Papers of John Marshall. In 1989 she became the editor of publications at the Omohundro Institute, presiding over the Book Publications program. There she has acquired and substantively edited approximately fifty books, many of which have won nationally recognized prizes for excellence in their field. Concurrently, she has been a lecturer in the History Department at the College of William and Mary, where she has taught courses on the American frontier. With the support of fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute, the Huntington Library, and the American Antiquarian Society, she has done extensive research and writing on Smith, her literary output, and early Washington society and has published a number of articles on the topic, the most recent of which appeared in Revising Charles Brockden Brown.
