Environmental historian William Cronon.

With the 40th anniversary of the landmark federal Clean Water Act approaching in mid-October, Bates College will observe the occasion with a talk by influential environmental historian William Cronon at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 20, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Cronon’s talk, titled The Riddle of Sustainability: A Surprisingly Short History of the Future, is the Charles and Virginia Tangney History Lecture at Bates. Open to the public at no cost, the event is the second installment in this fall’s Civic Forum Series, produced for Bates by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships.

The talk is jointly sponsored by the history department, the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, and the environmental studies program, as well as the Harward Center. For more information, please call 207-786-6202.

Cronon is Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He studies American environmental history and the history of the American West.

He is a national leader in the study of past human interactions with nature, concentrating on how people depend on the ecosystems around them to sustain their material lives, how they modify the landscapes in which they live and how ideas of nature shape the world around us.

Cronon heads UW-Madison’s Center for Culture, History and Environment, which brings together scholars from disciplines as diverse as anthropology, history and forestry to study environmental and cultural change throughout human history.

He has written and edited several prize-winning books, including Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (Norton, 1991), which was awarded the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for best non-fiction work in 1991 and was one of three nominees for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in History.

Oct. 18 is the 40th anniversary of the Clean Water Act of 1972, one of two transformational pieces of environmental legislation championed by the late U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie, Democrat of Maine. Bates has a special interest in this legislation that launched a massive cleanup of the nation’s waters.

A member of the college’s class of 1936, Muskie was a native of Rumford and grew up near the Androscoggin River, which by the mid-20th century was one of the U.S. waterways most badly affected by industrial and municipal pollution. The Androscoggin has long been the focus of research by Bates students and faculty, including one chemist, Walter Lawrance, who was the state-appointed Androscoggin rivermaster.

Pat Webber, newly appointed director of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, poses in Riverside Cemetery near campus, where he leads an annual Bates history tour. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

For Pat Webber, becoming director of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library at Bates was in the cards.

As a boy, Webber recalls taking out his baseball card collection and scatter the dog-eared cards on the floor and sort them by the players’ last names.

Then he’d scatter the cards again, and sort them by team. And scatter again, and sort yet another way.

“I should’ve realized when I was 8 that I was going to be an archivist,” says Webber.

The college archivist since 2006, Webber was the Muskie Archives’ acting director this past academic year following the departure of Kat Stefko for a post at Duke University.

Gene Wiemers, vice president for information and library services and college librarian, says that Webber’s appointment, following a national search, “reflects well on his training and experience. The Bates archives operations require archivists who are both innovative and committed to the user. Pat embodies and builds on this tradition.”

Wiemers adds that Webber is “an expert on Bates and Muskie history, and he has played a key role in promoting the use of the archives and special collections among students, faculty, staff and the general public.”

Webber came to Bates from the Special Collections Research Center of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, N.C., where he earned a master’s in public history in 2003. He earned a master’s in history from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2001 and bachelor’s from the College of William & Mary in 1988.

In May 1980, Edmund Muskie ’36 is sworn in as secretary of state under President Carter (left) by Frank Coffin ’40 (right), chief judge of the 1st Circuit. Also looking on are his daughter Ellen Muskie Allen (second from left) and wife Jane Muskie (second from right). Photograph by Bill Fitzpatrick/White House, courtesy of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

As its name suggests, the archives’ centerpiece collection is the papers of Ed Muskie, 1936 Bates alumnus, U.S. senator, vice presidential and presidential candidate and secretary of state.

“For almost every issue of national importance during his time, you’re going to find some information in the Muskie Collection,” Webber says.

The archives has two other identities: It’s the official repository for college records (this was Webber’s area of focus prior to his appointment as director), and it also holds a diverse collection of rare books, oral histories, photographs and films, manuscript collections and other items.

Among the recently processed collections generating interest are the papers of Professor of Chemistry Walter Lawrance. As the state-appointed “river master” of the Androscoggin River from 1947 to 1978, he had legal power to control the amount of pollution discharged into the river by the three major paper mills located along it.

Much of the Lawrance collection is now available online thanks to digitizing efforts by environmental studies faculty and students working with the archives.

The papers of Bates chemistry professor and Androscoggin “river master” Walter Lawrance (right, in 1949) are now online. Photo courtesy of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

And as his card-collecting past suggests, Webber’s mission is to keep this complex collection of Bates history preserved, sensibly organized and accessible to today’s academic community.

For Webber and the archives staff, “accessible” has a proactive meaning.

Webber has taught or co-taught the history Short Term course “Introduction to Archives and Archival Science,” and he leads a popular tour of nearby Riverside Cemetery, the resting place of many early Bates leaders and professors.

“Every cemetery plot tells a story,” he says. “Language professor Benjamin Hayes and science professor Richard Stanley served Bates for a combined 64 years in the 1800s. Their friendship was likely very strong: Their families share a single plot.”

Webber says it’s important for the archives to keep one foot in the past and one in the present.

For example, students and professors who are curious about Bates’ inclusive history are always captivated by the college’s 1950s-era enrollment and career publications: one version for men and one for women.

“But they don’t just want to look at, say, When a Girl Goes to Bates in historical context,” Webber says. “They want to go beyond that and ask, ‘What does this say about Bates today?’ We’ve been inclusive for 150-plus years, but how has that really played out?”

The women’s dining room in Rand Hall, circa 1920. The archives supports faculty and students looking at how Bates’ inclusive ideals have played out in reality. Photograph courtesy of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

Webber recalls how Professor of History Margaret Creighton and her students took on that question. For her course “A Woman’s Place,” examining gender and geography in the U.S. from 1800 to today, students looked at dining at Bates, which was not coeducational until the 1960s.

From looking at historical materials, including articles in The Bates Student, “the project morphed from ‘Here’s where women used to eat, and here’s where men used to eat,’ into a discussion of the culture of Bates dining today, the politics of who sits where and that sort of thing,” Webber says.

Early in his career, Webber did archeological fieldwork, then worked in the geotechnical services field in the construction industry for nearly a decade. Then he switched to archival work. “I’ve gone from archeology to geology to archives, so at least I’m getting more modern,” he jokes.

Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell offers the keynote address during the "Open to the World" events on Oct. 27. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

Sharing the Chapel chancel with 15 Bates students supported in their studies by a statewide program that he founded, former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell used incidents from his own life to drive home higher education’s value to both personal growth and economic success.

Praising Bates as a college “in the forefront of higher education,” Mitchell addressed the Bates community Oct. 27 following the dedication ceremony for newly renovated Hedge and Roger Williams halls.

• Video: George’s Mitchell’s keynote address
  

Bates President Nancy Cable introduced Mitchell with an impressive summation of the senator’s long career in public service.

George Mitchell, whose Mitchell Institute provides scholarships to Maine students, greets Bates Mitchell Scholars on Oct. 27. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

“The United States is the first true meritocracy in human history,” Mitchell told about 200 people in the Chapel. But that meritocracy is broken if its benefits aren’t available to all Americans. “We have to make certain that we can draw on the talents of every member of our society,” and improving access to higher education is one way to do that. (In discussing the rising inaffordability of higher education, Mitchell’s speech anticipated the college-costs symposium scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 29.)

Mitchell pulled out statistics to support the common wisdom that more education means greater financial health. In Maine, he said, recent studies have indicated that people holding a bachelor’s degree earn 50 percent more than those who don’t. Similarly, those who stopped with a high school diploma are more than twice as likely to be unemployed than B.A. holders.

“We have a huge challenge in front of us,” he said, “but it’s also a huge opportunity, and it can provide a huge benefit to our state and our society,” meaning the higher tax revenues and lower government spending that come with higher rates of college graduation.

“It is a good investment to help young people go to college.”

Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell answers questions following his "Open to the World" keynote address as Associate Professor of Politics John Baughman looks on. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

In a parallel to a story told during the dedication by Paul Marks ’83, Mitchell used his own example to illustrate the transformational role education can have. During a question-and-answer session that followed his address, he described growing up in Waterville, Maine, a son of a woman who was a Lebanese immigrant and a father of Irish extraction. A poor athlete among siblings highly accomplished in sports, Mitchell had poor self-esteem and was an indifferent student.

But a teacher at Waterville High School took Mitchell aside, gave him a book (John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down) and told him to read it and give her an oral report on it. He read the book that night, she gave him another, and what followed was a literary year that turned Mitchell, a future federal judge, senator, peace-broker and author, into a reader. “My life would have been very different” without that teacher, he said.

Years later, as senator, Mitchell attended a University of Maine conference examining the aspirations of Maine’s young people. The message from the conference was that many young people in Maine, especially rural and low-income, had low aspirations.

Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell speaks with a guest during a reception following Mitchell's "Open to the World" keynote address.

After the conference, hoping to serve as a role model, Mitchell set himself the goal of visiting every Maine high school twice, once to speak at graduation and once to meet with students and teachers. “I saw in the eyes of many of those students a mirror image of myself at their age,” he said.

What grew out of that effort was the Mitchell Institute, founded in 1994. Based in Portland, the institute grants a Mitchell Scholarship to a graduating senior from every public high school in Maine who will attend a two-or four-year postsecondary degree program. Among the more than 1,800 Mitchell Scholars to date, 93 have attended Bates, Mitchell said.

The institute has an especially close connection to Bates, as Bates’ own William Hiss ’66, longtime admissions dean and now a development officer, was, Mitchell said, “the most influential person in advising how this program would be set up and implemented. “He was, and is, one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, in the field of education and beyond.”

(He was so impressed by Hiss that at one point, he asked Hiss to lead the institute. Hiss declined, but recommended someone else for the job — his wife, Colleen Quint ’86. A former Mitchell staffer in the Senate, she has been executive director since 1999.)

Mitchell has still another Bates connection in the late Edmund S. Muskie ’36, whom he described as “my mentor, my hero and ultimately my friend.” A former aide to Muskie during his long tenure in the U.S. Senate, Mitchell was later tapped to fill the Senate seat Muskie vacated when he became U.S. Secretary of State under President Jimmy Carter.

Mitchell concluded his formal speech by describing the satisfaction he felt, from the perspective of an immigrant’s son, as a federal judge presiding over naturalization ceremonies. After the ceremonies, he used to ask the new Americans about their stories and why they wanted to be citizens. One young man, not yet a great English speaker, answered, “I came here because in America everybody has a chance.”

Mitchell said, “A young man who had been an American for 10 minutes, who could barely speak English, was able to sum up the meaning of being an American in a single sentence.”

Muskie, who gave the speech just prior to the bitter 1970 midterm elections, was taking on President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, who were blaming Democrats for the era’s urban violence and questioning their patriotism for opposing the Vietnam war. But Muskie “was appealing for more than votes,” Shribman writes. He was appealing for “a less pugilistic politics, and though he would have a distinguished Senate career and later serve as secretary of state, this may have been his finest hour.”

Said Muskie, “Our country is wounded and confused — but it is also charged with greatness and with the possibility of greatness. We cannot realize that possibility if we are afraid … or if we consume our energies in hostility and accusation.”

Shribman, who gathered material for the column during the Muskie Archives’ 25th anniversary program during Parents & Family Weekend, writes  that “though this speech today is hardly remembered outside the Muskie Archives here at Bates College, his alma mater, we need to hear and heed it today.” View Shribman’s column from the Post-Gazette. View a transcript of Muskie’s 1970 speech.

The environmental legacy of the late U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie ’36, who was dubbed “Mr. Clean” for spearheading clean water and air laws in the 1960s and 1970s, found its way into a Supreme Court ruling May 15.

The ruling, affirming the states’ right to regulate river water quality, was handed down in a Maine case. At issue was whether a Westbrook paper company needed state licensing to operate five company-owned hydroelectric dams on the Presumpscot River. The state, wishing to use the licensing procedure to force the company to make dam improvements, argued for the power to license under the Clean Water Act of 1970. The company argued that dams weren’t covered under the law.

Writing a unanimous opinion, Justice David Souter championed the Clean Water Act and Muskie’s vision of states having ultimate control of their rivers, not the federal government. He quoted from Muskie’s 1970 floor speech in the U.S. Senate as the Rumford native introduced the legislation:

“No polluter will be able to hide behind a federal license or permit as an excuse for a violation of water quality standards,” said Muskie. “No polluter will be able to make major investments in facilities under a federal license or permit without providing assurance that the facility will comply with water quality standards. No state water pollution control agency will be confronted with a /fait accompli/ by an industry that has built a plant without consideration of water quality requirements.”