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Birch Evans Bayh Jr. (; January 22, 1928 – March 14, 2019) was an American politician from Indiana who served as a member of the Indiana House of Representatives representing Vigo County, Indiana from 1954 to 1962 and as a member of United States Senate for three terms from 1963 to 1981. A member of the Democratic Party, he was first elected to office in 1954, when he won election to the Indiana House of Representatives; in 1958, he was elected Speaker, the youngest person to hold that office in the state's history. In 1962, he ran for the U.S. Senate, narrowly defeating incumbent Republican Homer E. Capehart. Shortly after entering the Senate, he became Chairman of the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, and in that role authored two constitutional amendments: the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution—which establishes procedures for an orderly transition of power in the case of the death, disability, or resignation of the President of the United States—and the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which lowered the voting age to 18 throughout the United States. He is the first person since James Madison and the only non–Founding Father to have authored more than one constitutional amendment to date. Bayh also led unsuccessful efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and eliminate the United States Electoral College.
Bayh authored Title IX of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which bans sexism in higher education institutions that receive federal funding. He also authored the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, and co-authored the Bayh–Dole Act, which deals with intellectual property that arises from federal-government-funded research. Bayh voted in favor of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968, as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the confirmation of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court of the United States. He led the Senate opposition to the nominations of Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell, two of Richard Nixon's unsuccessful Supreme Court nominees. Bayh intended to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, but declined to run after his wife was diagnosed with cancer. He sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, but dropped out of the campaign after disappointing finishes in the first set of primaries and caucuses.
Bayh won re-election in 1968 and 1974, but lost his 1980 bid for a fourth term to Dan Quayle, who later became Vice President of the United States under President of the United States George H. W. Bush from Texas. After leaving the Senate, he remained active in the political and legal world. His son, Evan Bayh, served as the 46th Governor of Indiana and held his father's former U.S. Senate seat from 1999 to 2011.
From 1946 to 1948, Bayh served as a Military Police Corps with the United States Army in occupied Germany following World War II. He excelled in sports, competing as a Golden Gloves boxer in college and taking part in two Major League Baseball tryouts. Bayh graduated from the Purdue University School of Agriculture in 1951, where he was a member of the Alpha Tau Omega social fraternity and senior class president. In 1951, he won Alpha Tau Omega's highest individual collegiate award, the Thomas Arkle Clark Award. He married Marvella Hern in August 1952, and took courses at Indiana State University in Terre Haute for two years while also running the family farm.
At age 34, Bayh was elected to the United States Senate in the 1962 United States Senate elections, defeating 18-year incumbent Homer E. Capehart. Capehart was outspoken on the threat of Soviet nuclear missiles being placed in Cuba, and was buoyed by the Cuban Missile Crisis of that October. Bayh's disadvantage was dramatized in the opening scene of the 2000 film Thirteen Days, as President John F. Kennedy rattles a newspaper and asks an aide, "You see this goddamn Capehart stuff?" and the aide responds, "Bayh's going to lose".
Bayh's success was attributed to a vigorous campaign of 300 speeches between Labor Day and the election, and a catchy campaign jingle that taught voters the correct pronunciation of his last name:
For more than four decades — throughout his entire career in politics — Bayh continued to manage the growing of Maize and on his family farm.
Bayh was serving on the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution in August 1963 when its chairman, Estes Kefauver, died of a heart attack. Judiciary Committee Chairman James Eastland planned to terminate the subcommittee to save money, but Bayh offered to serve as chairman and pay for its staff out of his Senate office budget. Thus, Bayh assumed the Constitutional Amendments Subcommittee chairmanship less than a year into his first term. As chairman, Bayh was the principal architect of two constitutional amendments.
In 1968, Bayh wrote One Heartbeat Away, a book about the passage of the Twenty-fifth Amendment. In the foreword, Lyndon Johnson describes the accomplishment as, "He initiated and brought to fruition the first major alteration of Presidential and Vice-Presidential succession procedures since the ratification of the Constitution". The book's preface is by former President Eisenhower, who wrote about the sixteen times there had been a vacancy in the office of Vice President and the measures taken to authorize Vice President Richard Nixon to act in his stead during the illnesses he experienced as president.
In 1980, Bayh endorsed President Jimmy Carter for reelection, a decision that rankled the staff of Ted Kennedy, who was challenging Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination. Kennedy's campaign adviser Bob Shrum called Bayh "a son of a bitch" in front of Kennedy, but as Shrum wrote in his memoir, "Kennedy was disappointed in Bayh, but he didn't want to hear anyone bitching about him. Bayh, he said, had a pass, and always would".
In 1970, Bayh witnessed one of these efforts to pass the ERA languish and fail due to poor-wording and "Wrecking amendment" conservative amendments. Through his Constitutional Amendments Subcommittee, Bayh drafted a new version of the ERA to be taken up by the 92nd United States Congress. Bayh based his appeal on extending the rights already guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to a person's gender. The new version immediately won support from two important Senators who had opposed the earlier bill: Ted Kennedy and Robert P. Griffin, the assistant Republican leader. After the House approved its version under the leadership of Martha Griffiths of Michigan, the Senate easily passed Bayh's ERA in March 1972, sending it to the states for ratification. The amendment had seven years to win approval in thirty-eight states. Thirty states ratified the ERA within the first two years, and another four joined in 1974 and 1975. Bayh's home state of Indiana was the final state to ratify the ERA in January 1977, but by then, three states had rescinded their ratification, and three more would do so by the end of 1979. Bayh successfully fought to extend the seven-year ratification period to June 30, 1982, but the Equal Rights Amendment ultimately failed.
Bayh would later say he never anticipated how effective conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly "telling flat-out lies" would be. "Bayh says he will never forget", the Associated Press reported, "how she went on Indiana television, set her Social Security card on fire and argued that women would lose constitutional protections if ERA won".
In his remarks on the Senate floor, Bayh said, "We are all familiar with the stereotype of women as pretty things who go to college to find a husband, go on to postgraduate education because they want a more interesting husband, and finally marry, have children, and never work again. The desire of many schools not to waste a 'man's place' on a woman stems from such stereotyped notions. But the facts absolutely contradict these myths about the 'weaker sex' and it is time to change our operating assumptions".118 Cong. Record 5804 (1972).
"While the impact of this amendment would be far-reaching", Bayh concluded, "it is not a panacea. It is, however, an important first step in the effort to provide for the women of America something that is rightfully theirs — an equal chance to attend the schools of their choice, to develop the skills they want, and to apply those skills with the knowledge that they will have a fair chance to secure the jobs of their choice with equal pay for equal work".118 Cong. Record 5808 (1972).
Title IX became law on June 23, 1972, "Legislative History of Title IX" National Organization for Women. June 27, 2007. and is best known for expanding opportunities for female athletes. Bayh has since been called "the father of Title IX".
In August 1969, Nixon nominated Clement Haynsworth, a federal judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, to a vacancy on the Supreme Court created by the resignation of Abe Fortas on May 14, 1969. Labor and civil rights leaders, concerned with Haynsworth's conservative record on workers' and civil rights, soon discovered that Haynsworth had recently ruled in a favor of a company in which he owned stock, and after questioning him on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Bayh felt Haynsworth did not recognize his own conflict of interest. By October, Bayh was widely recognized as "the leading opponent" of the nomination, and The New York Times reported how he "worked with his staff into the night to complete a "bill of particulars" of alleged financial conflicts by Judge Haynsworth", ultimately uncovering several additional instances where Haynsworth had conflicts and misled in his Senate Judiciary testimony. Thus, in November 1969, Bayh and 54 other senators rejected the nomination.
On January 19, 1970, Nixon nominated G. Harrold Carswell of Florida, whom the Senate had confirmed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit exactly seven months earlier. Carswell's judicial record was even more conservative then Haynsworth's and generally acknowledged to be mediocre, but after the earlier defeat of the latter's nomination, most doubted there would be another major battle. Then a group of Yale Law School students visited Bayh in Washington and asked how they could help. Bayh suggested that they research every case that Carswell had decided in his judicial career. They did so and reported back that Carswell's civil rights decisions had been reversed sixty percent of the time. With their research in hand, "Bayh led the opposition interrogation of Carswell in the two weeks of committee hearings", United Press International reported. The Senate rejected Carswell's nomination by a vote of 51 to 45.
Nixon publicly criticized Bayh and Senate opponents for overstepping their proper constitutional role, to which Bayh replied in a Senate floor speech by quoting from Article Two of the United States Constitution and calling the President "wrong as a matter of constitutional law, wrong as a matter of history and wrong as a matter of public policy". Harry Blackmun was ultimately nominated and confirmed to fill the vacancy. Bayh later supported and voted to confirm Nixon's nomination of Lewis F. Powell Jr., whom he knew well from work on the Twenty-fifth Amendment.
In an undated White House memorandum made public on June 27, 1973, Bayh's name appeared on the master list of Nixon's political opponents, a supplement to Nixon's Enemies List.
but it never achieved the required two-thirds vote in either chamber of the United States Congress contained in Article Five of the United States Constitution. In 2006, he joined the National Popular Vote Inc. coalition, which aims to effect Electoral College reform through an interstate compact. Bayh wrote a foreword to the book Every Vote Equal by John Koza, a co-founder of National Popular Vote.
On October 21, 1975, Bayh announced his candidacy for the 1976 Democratic nomination in a tour of his native state. "People are looking to someone who can talk to them in terms they can understand", he said while struggling with laryngitis that day. With a liberal record and farm boy demeanor, Bayh's candidacy was premised on his 'electability.' His campaign literature was headlined, "Yes He Can". In December 1975, Bayh came within a tenth of a percentage point from receiving the endorsement of the influential New Democratic Coalition, a liberal organization based in New York that helped George McGovern win the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination.
On the eve of the January 19, 1976, Iowa caucuses, Bayh and former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter were considered the leading candidates. Bayh ultimately finished a distant third behind Uncommitted delegates and Carter, seemingly hindered by his support for women's rights. "Bayh has become the focal point of the abortion issue", said the executive director of the National Right to Life Committee, since Bayh opposed a constitutional amendment banning abortion before his subcommittee. Liberal support did not coalesce and Bayh finished third in the New Hampshire and then seventh in the Massachusetts primary.
Bayh suspended his campaign on March 4, 1976, after 136 days as a formal candidate. At his final press conference, he said, "I'm not prepared to crawl under a rock and say the future of Birch Bayh is over".
Bayh invited U.S. Senate member Bob Dole, a Republican from Kansas, to craft a uniform policy. Together, they drafted the university and Small Business Patent Procedures Act, known as the Bayh–Dole Act, which allows United States universities, small businesses, and non-profit organizations to retain intellectual property rights of inventions developed from federal government-funded research. It was signed into law by President Carter on December 12, 1980.
In 2002, The Economist magazine said, "Possibly the most inspired piece of legislation to be enacted in America over the past half-century was the Bayh–Dole Act of 1980". A 2015 study determined that from 1996 to 2013, patent licensing made possible by Bayh–Dole increased gross industry output by approximately $1 trillion, supporting 3.8 million jobs in the United States.
In 1980, Bayh faced Indiana's 4th congressional district member and future Vice President of the United States Dan Quayle. Bayh engaged the challenger in seven debates, and was defeated for reelection in Republican landslide year as part of Reagan's coattails, with 46.2% of the vote to Quayle's 53.8%.
On December 23, 2010, Bayh filed an amicus brief in Stanford v. Roche, a case in which the Supreme Court was asked to determine whether the Bayh–Dole Act required that ownership patents for inventions resulting from federally funded research must automatically go to the federal contractor. Bayh argued that "a federal contractor's ownership rights to inventions covered by the Bayh–Dole Act cannot be terminated unilaterally by an individual inventor through a separate agreement purporting to assign the inventor's rights to a third party". The court disagreed, writing that "the Bayh–Dole Act does not automatically vest title to federally funded inventions in federal contractors or authorize contractors to unilaterally take title to such inventions".
Bayh continued to advocate for the direct election of the president, speaking with lawmakers around the country about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, in which states agree to pledge their presidential electors to the winner of the national popular vote once a majority of presidential electors join the compact. Bayh served on the advisory board of the non-profit, National Popular Vote, Inc.
Bayh served as a member of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, as co-chair of the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs National Commission on Presidential Disability and the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, and as founding chairman of the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence.
In 2003, Indianapolis's historic U.S. Courthouse and Post Office was renamed in Bayh's honor as the Birch Bayh Federal Building and United States Courthouse.
In 2009, Indiana State University named their College of Education after the Bayh family; Senator Bayh was the fourth member of the Bayh family to attend Indiana State University (following his grandmother, father and mother); his late wife, Marvella Hern Bayh, was also an alumna of Indiana State University.
Birch and Kitty Bayh resided in Easton, Maryland. He was a fellow at the C.V Starr Center for the study of the American Experience of Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.
Bayh died of pneumonia on March 14, 2019, in Easton, Maryland, at the age of 91. He was the last living former U.S. senator who served during the Presidency of John F. Kennedy. He was interred at Arlington National Cemetery.
| + United States Senator from Indiana (Class III): Results 1962–1980 ! | Year ! | Democrat ! | Votes ! | % ! | Republican ! | Votes ! | % !Source |
| 1962 | 905,491 | 50.3% | Homer E. Capehart | 894,548 | 49.7% | ||
| 1968 | 1,060,456 | 51.7% | William D. Ruckelshaus | 988,571 | 48.2% | ||
| 1974 | 889,269 | 50.7% | Richard Lugar | 814,114 | 46.4% | ||
| 1980 | Birch Bayh | 1,015,922 | 46.2% | Dan Quayle | 1,182,414 | 53.8% |
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