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)
Henry Wiencek
Patrick Henry Fellow, C.V. Starr Center
Award-winning historian Henry Wiencek has taken up residence at Washington College for the 2008-09 academic year as the Starr Center’s inaugural Patrick Henry Fellow.
His forthcoming book on Thomas Jefferson and his slaves promises to shed new light on a subject that has received much attention, but often only through the narrow prism of the Sally Hemings controversy or the intellectual paradox of Jefferson’s views on race and liberty. For the past three years, Wiencek has immersed himself in Jefferson’s papers and plantation documents, in the oral histories of slave descendants, in Ablemarle County court records, and in the papers of Jefferson’s extended family. Comparing and contrasting these sources with the new discoveries emanating from Monticello’s archaeological program, he has documented the daily experience of slavery on Jefferson’s mountain. “We’ve seen Jefferson’s relations with slaves entirely through the eyes of Sally Hemings and her family,” he notes. “But she was just one of 600 slaves at Monticello. Life for the Hemings family was one thing. Life for those laboring farther down the hill was quite different.”
Wiencek has written and/or edited more than a dozen books. He is perhaps best known for An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America, which Farrar, Straus & Giroux published in 2003 to superlative reviews and which was named Best Book of that year by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. The historian Gordon Wood, writing in the New York Times, called it "superb" and the Washington Post said, "It must be read by all who wish to understand early America." Wiencek’s The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White (St. Martin's, 1999) – the epic story of two extended southern families who share a surname and a legacy, though one is black and the other white – was a selection of the Book of the Month Club and the History Book Club. “Not since Mary Chesnut’s Civil War has nonfiction about the South been as compelling as fiction,” wrote a reviewer for Time magazine.
A Yale graduate, Wiencek held several editorial positions with Time-Life Books and served as series editor for The Smithsonian Guide to Historic America before turning to writing full-time. His books have won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Biography. He is an Affiliate Fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, sits on the Board of the Library of Virginia, and held a 2005 Research Fellowship at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. Wiencek and his wife, writer Donna Lucey, whose books include Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age (Macmillan, 2006), have for many years made their home in Charlottesville, in the shadow of Jefferson’s mountain.
