Liberal Indiana senator championed Title IX
Birch Bayh, the liberal former senator from Indiana whose work in Congress had an enduring impact on American life — in protecting women from sex discrimination in education, guaranteeing 18year-olds the right to vote and providing for the removal of a sitting president — died Thursday at his home in Easton, Maryland.
He was 91.
The cause was pneumonia, the family said in a statement announcing his death.
Bayh, a Democrat who served in the Senate from 1963 to 1981, drove some of the most historic legislation of his era.
He was the principal architect of two constitutional amendments: the 25th, which dealt with presidential disability and vice-presidential vacancies, and the 26th, which gave 18-year-olds the vote in both state and federal elections.
He was a chief Senate sponsor of the failed Equal Rights Amendment, which would enshrine in the Constitution protections against discrimination on the basis of sex.
He pushed through another amendment that would have abolished the Electoral College and had presidents elected by direct popular vote, lining up strong support in the Senate but failing in the end to muster enough votes to send it to the states for ratification.
And he championed Title IX, drafting the language for that legislation, which barred sex discrimination at schools and colleges and greatly expanded sports programs for women.
Title IX brought him his greatest satisfaction, Bayh said — even though many others were involved in its passage, as he acknowledged, notably Reps. Edith Green of Oregon and Patsy Mink of Hawaii.
“I’d say probably this had a more profound impact on more Americans than anything else I was able to do,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2010. In 1972, in a speech on the Senate floor, Bayh said: “One of the great failings of the American educational system is the continuation of corrosive and unjustified discrimination against women. It is clear to me that sex discrimination reaches into all facets of education — admissions, scholarship programs, faculty hiring and promotion, professional staffing and pay scales.”
Bayh, a farmer and lawyer, had been speaker of the Indiana General Assembly when he was elected to the Senate in 1962, upsetting a three-term incumbent, Homer Capehart.
As a freshman, Bayh was made chairman of the Senate Judiciary’s subcommittee on constitutional amendments, a post he held for almost two decades.
Perhaps the most dramatic moment in Bayh’s life took place away from the Senate. He was traveling with a friend, Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, to a Democratic convention there June 19, 1964.
After voting for final passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the two senators rushed to National Airport, where a small chartered plane was ready to take them to Westfield, Mass.
The airport in Massachusetts was fogged in, and the plane crashed when the pilot tried to make an instrument landing.
The pilot and a Kennedy aide were killed, and Kennedy’s back was broken. Bayh and his wife, Marvella, managed to climb out of the crashed plane.
Fearing a fuel fire, Birch Bayh went back to the plane and dragged Kennedy to safety through a hole in the fuselage.
Bayh was born Jan. 22, 1928, in Terre Haute, Ind., to Leah (Hollingsworth) Bayh, a high school teacher, and Birch Bayh Sr., a former head basketball coach and athletic director at what’s now Indiana State University and a longtime specialist in physical education. Birch Jr. had a younger sister, Mary Alice.
He graduated from Purdue University in 1951 and from the Indiana University School of Law in 1960. Marvella (Hern) Bayh, his first wife, died in 1979 at 46.
He’s survived by a son from that marriage, Birch Evans Bayh III, a former governor of Indiana and senator from that state who is known as Evan; and two grandchildren. He’s also survived by his second wife, Katherine (Halpin) Bayh, known as Kitty, and their son, Christopher.