In this early 1960s image, U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie ’36 and Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, with an unidentified park ranger, visit Maine’s Cadillac Mountain. Image courtesy of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

One of the landmark environmental laws developed by the late U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie, the Clean Water Act turns 40 in mid-October 2012.

Bates College, from which Muskie graduated in 1936, presents a panel discussion exploring the history and future of the Clean Water Act at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 1, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Editor’s Note, Oct. 5, 2012: See video of the panel.

The event is open to the public at no cost. An installment of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships’ Civic Forum series, the event is jointly sponsored with the history department, the environmental studies program and the Muskie Archives. For more information, please call 207-786-6202.

The panelists are:

• Stephen Hinchman, an attorney who works with the Androscoggin River Alliance, an organization dedicated to the health of the river, the local economy and local communities;
• Pete Didisheim, advocacy director of the Natural Resources Council of Maine, one of Maine’s best-known environmental advocacy organizations;
• Emily Figdor, director of Environment Maine, a research, education and advocacy organization;
• and John Storer, engineer for the city of Auburn’s water and sewerage districts and the Lake Auburn Watershed Protection Commission.

A native of Rumford, Maine, Muskie grew up well-aware of the sorry condition of the Androscoggin River, rendered one of the nation’s dirtiest waterways by decades of municipal and industrial pollution. An early champion of environmental protection, Muskie spearheaded the Clean Air Act of 1970 and later the Clean Water Act.

Today, while not pristine, the Androscoggin is dramatically healthier and is increasingly the focus of recreational and economic development initiatives.

Coinciding with growing public awareness of environmental issues and the establishment of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, these laws were instrumental both in reducing pollution of the nation’s air and waters, and establishing the pro-environmental mindset that continues to shape U.S. society and policymaking today.

Goldstein was a scholar-in-residence at the Bates’ Muskie Archives last year when he was working on a book about the vice presidency.  This article includes a link back to the Archives.

Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

Joel Goldstein, an expert on the U.S. vice presidency, presents the lecture Campaigning for America: Edmund S. Muskie’s 1968 Vice Presidential Campaign at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, April 3, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library at Bates College, 70 Campus Ave.

The talk comes during the 40th anniversary year of Muskie’s vice-presidential campaign and the 50th anniversary of his election to the U.S. Senate. The event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-6272.

Goldstein, the Vincent C. Immel Professor of Law at St. Louis University, is currently a visiting professor at the University of Maine School of Law and the Muskie School of Public Service. He has written books, numerous chapters and journal articles on the U.S. executive branch, constitutional law and admiralty law.

Goldstein may be best-known as an expert on the vice presidency. He has written widely on the topic and is frequently interviewed on it, and has consulted on vice presidential selections.

The late Muskie, a member of the Bates class of 1936, served as Maine governor, U.S. senator, vice presidential and presidential candidate, and U.S. secretary of state under President Jimmy Carter. In the Senate, he authored landmark environmental legislation including the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, regarded as two of the most important bills of the 20th century.

In 1968 Muskie ran with Democratic presidential candidate and then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey. “It is worth considering the example Muskie set when he, for the first time, campaigned throughout America and America discovered him,” says Goldstein.

“His vice-presidential campaign was unique in the annals of modern national campaigns. He spent an unusual amount of time articulating basic American values and imploring his audience to reconnect with them.”

The campaign came at a time, Goldstein explains, when many Americans were losing faith in their government and in politics. “Muskie, in speech after speech, defended the political system and challenged Americans to trust not only their government, but each other,” he says.

As a senator from Maine, a state with few electoral votes, Muskie was an unlikely choice for running mate, Goldstein says. Presidential candidates tended to choose nationally prominent politicians or those from states commanding a large number of electoral votes.

“Muskie’s campaign helped change the paradigm in vice-presidential selection away from traditional ticket-balancing criteria” and toward presidential qualities “that would impress the electorate as such.”

Goldstein’s first book, The Modern American Vice Presidency: The Transformation of a Political Institution (Princeton University Press, 1982), evolved from his doctoral dissertation. He is currently writing a book on the vice presidency as it has developed during the last 30 years. He is also working on studies of Muskie and of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.

Goldstein received a doctorate in political science at Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar, and a law degree from Harvard Law School. After Harvard he was a law clerk for Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts, and later practiced admiralty law for 12 years at Goldstein and Price in St. Louis.

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Edmund S. Muskie’s alma mater has completed a project that tells the late U.S. statesman’s story in the voices of those who knew him.

Begun in 1997, the Edmund S. Muskie Oral History Project at Bates College comprises some 440 interviews with people who worked with, otherwise knew or were directly affected by Muskie. A native of Rumford, Maine, and member of the Bates class of 1936, Muskie went on to become Maine governor, U.S. senator, U.S. secretary of state and a candidate for the White House.

The interviews are preserved on audio media and in print transcriptions edited and indexed by project staff. They are kept in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library at Bates, joining a Muskie documentary collection that is among the largest U.S. political collections outside the presidential libraries.

“The interviews provide many perspectives on Edmund Muskie as a public and private figure — as well as a sense of the times, a feeling for the issues with which he was associated and a mosaic of his friends, colleagues, staff and opponents,” says Don Nicoll, project director and a longtime friend of Muskie’s.

The materials are open not only to Bates students and faculty, but to any researchers studying Muskie and the issues in which he was involved.

The interviews “fill in the gap in the written record,” says Nicoll. “Many also provide clues that lead to important incidents or developments in public policy, or help us to understand what lay behind the plain text of committee reports or memoranda.”

“They give insights into Muskie’s personality and character that might otherwise elude us,” he adds. “We’ve worked hard to be sure the record contains favorable, neutral and unfavorable views of Senator Muskie. We aimed to illuminate his life, not glorify it.”

“When I began on this project, I knew Senator Muskie’s biography pretty well, but what I’ve learned over the years from innumerable anecdotes really illustrated his character and personality,” says project assistant Andrea L’Hommedieu, who conducted many of the oral history interviews and is now working on an oral history of Bates.

Though a Maine native, L’Hommedieu was surprised to learn that Muskie’s Blaine House run in the 1950s did more than make him governor. Muskie, along with Nicoll and Bates alumni Frank Coffin and John Donovan, belonged to an innovative group that gave new life to a Democratic Party long out of power in Maine.

“Muskie was so extraordinary, and so very human at the same time, that you couldn’t help not only to admire him, but to strive to be more like him in his civic-mindedness,” says L’Hommedieu, who points to Muskie’s pioneering role in creating U.S. environmental law. “I’m much more aware of my civic responsibilities, and more active in volunteer organizations, since the project began.”

Interviewees include Muskie’s friends from throughout his life, college contemporaries, Maine legislators, political associates and competitors, journalists, campaign supporters, gubernatorial and Senate staff, Senate colleagues, public officials, lobbyists, State Department officials, foreign-policy specialists, law practice associates and citizens associated with Muskie in myriad ways.

Among them are former Maine Gov. Kenneth Curtis, former Maine attorney general James Tierney and Howard Baker, until recently U.S. ambassador to Japan.

Nicoll first got to know Muskie in 1954, when Nicoll became the first full-time executive secretary of the Maine Democratic Party. He worked on Muskie’s two gubernatorial campaigns and his 1958 senatorial race, and later served as his news secretary, legislative assistant and administrative assistant in the Senate. The two remained close friends and colleagues until Muskie passed away in 1996.

Nicoll calls the oral history project, taken together with the Muskie documentary holdings at Bates, “a gold mine for anyone studying a wide range of political, legislative and international issues affected by the man who was one of the most versatile and formidable legislators in the history of our country.”

“This has been an unalloyed treat for me,” Nicoll says. “I’ve had an opportunity to contribute to an important modern historical record and have been able to refresh my memory — and, in some cases, to correct my recollections. And I’ve had numerous chances to visit with friends and former colleagues, and to gain a new appreciation of fine people I knew years ago only as antagonists.”

Although some editorial work remains to be done, the project’s official end came in December. The $225,000 project has been funded by the Edmund S. Muskie Foundation.

A Bangor native, Baldacci was elected to the Bangor City Council at age 23 and has served as Maine’s 2nd District congressional representative since 1995. He is the Democratic candidate in this fall’s race for Maine governor.
“Ed Muskie was one of Maine’s greatest leaders when it came to environmental activism and legislation,” Baldacci says. “As a great American statesmen and politician, his advocacy for the environment should serve as a reminder to us all that we need to protect our environment. As governor of Maine, I will carry on with Ed Muskie’s legacy.”

Born in Rumford, Edmund Sixtus Muskie was the son and grandson of Polish immigrants. In 1936 he graduated cum laude from Bates College, where he was president of his class and a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the debate team. After Cornell University Law School, he began practicing law in Waterville. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Navy in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters.

Muskie began his political career with three terms of service in the Maine House of Representatives, to which he was first elected in 1946. A Democrat in an overwhelmingly Republican state, he upset the established political order with his election as governor in 1954. Muskie served two terms as governor before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1958.

During his 21 years in the Senate, Muskie served on the foreign relations, governmental affairs, and environmental and public works committees, and was the founder and first chair of the Senate Committee on the Budget. In 1968 he was the Democratic nominee for U.S. vice president and made a strong bid for the 1972 presidential nomination.

He was sworn in as the 58th U.S. secretary of state in May 1980, a position he held until January 1981. After leaving public office, he joined a law firm in Washington, D.C., and was active in a number of organizations dealing with foreign policy and the environment, including the President’s Special Review Board (which investigated the Iran-Contra controversy).

Muskie died in 1996, in Washington, D.C., and his memorial service was held at the Bates College Chapel.

Dedicated in 1985, the Edmund S. Muskie Archives at Bates documents Muskie’s career in public service from his election to the Maine House to his appointment as U.S. secretary of state, as well as his activities after leaving public office. The archives also holds a permanent collection of Muskie memorabilia and a substantial oral history collection.

Baldacci is a moderate Democrat known for supporting education, budgetary and political reform in Washington, and economic development, especially as it would benefit Maine and the sprawling, rural 2nd District. He is also known for a folksy style that includes returning to his home state virtually every weekend and hosting spaghetti suppers for the people of Maine.

In a talk titled Something Splendid Has Happened Here’: An Allagash Legacy, Bennett, professor emeritus at the University of Maine at Farmington (UMF), examines the long struggle to preserve the Allagash as a wilderness area and how that effort fits into the larger movement to conserve wild and scenic rivers. Bennett will highlight the crucial role played by U.S. Sen. Edmund S. Muskie in establishing the Allagash Waterway and will discuss its future as a wilderness area.

Bennett is the author of The Wilderness from Chamberlain Farm: A Story of Hope for the American Wild (Island Press, 2001 ). At UMF, he taught courses in science education, interdisciplinary science, perspectives on nature, and curriculum and instruction. He holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in resource planning and conservation from the University of Michigan.

Born and raised in rural western Maine, Bennett is a naturalist at heart and spends much time exploring the natural history of the New England countryside. In addition to his work on Chamberlain Farm, his published works include Maine’s Natural Heritage: Rare Species and Unique Natural Features, Allagash: Maine’s Wild and Scenic River, and The Forgotten Nature of New England: A Search for Traces of the Original Wilderness.

Bennett and his wife, Sheila, visit the north Maine woods and the Allagash frequently and have produced a natural history guide to the area. They are active in a coalition of national and state organizations dedicated to preserving the Allagash Waterway as a primitive, unspoiled forest area in perpetuity.

Dedicated in 1985, the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library documents this 1936 Bates alumnus’ career in public service, from his first election to the Maine House of Representatives in 1946 to his appointment as U.S. secretary of state in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter. Each year the Archives sponsors lectures, symposia and conferences on national and state politics, foreign policy and the environment.

The collection of Oliphant’s work includes 15 cartoons drawn between 1969 and 1996. Most offer commentary on Muskie’s activities from 1969 to 1972, when he was a frontrunner for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination. One large caricature of Muskie on display was unveiled at his 80th birthday celebration in 1994.

“While some of the cartoons seem to poke fun at Muskie, as Oliphant did with all political figures, Muskie generally took the attention in good humor,” said Christopher Beam, director of the Muskie Archives and lecturer in history at Bates. “Muskie enjoyed political cartoons, and appreciated the cartoonist’s craft and the difficulties of condensing sometimes complex commentary into a single rendering.”

The prints originally were published in a number of national newspapers and were later acquired by the Muskie Foundation in Washington, D.C., which has exhibited them at the Maine State House and has loaned them indefinitely to Bates College. The foundation was established in 1997 to promote the legacy of one of Maine’s leading citizens and to support the activities of both the Muskie Archives at Bates and the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine.

Dedicated in 1985, the Edmund S. Muskie Archives documents the Bates alumnus’ career in public service from his first election to the Maine House of Representatives in 1946 to his appointment as U.S. Secretary of State in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter, and his activities after leaving public office. It holds a permanent collection of memorabilia from Muskie’s personal and public life and represents the first such facility in Maine to be established as a separate repository at an institution of higher education. Each year the Muskie Archives sponsors lectures, symposia and conferences on national and state politics, foreign policy and environmental issues.