Senator Robert C. Byrd 2007 OAH Friend of HistoryFrom the OAH President
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Every year the OAH executive board selects an individual or institution—usually not a professional historian—to receive the Friend of History Award. This year the award went to United States Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia in recognition of his advocacy of federal policies promoting the study of the history of the United States. On March 1, 2007 I had the pleasure of joining several other OAH representatives in Washington, DC, to present the award personally (1).
On March 1, 2007 Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) received the 2007 OAH Friend of History Award in the hearing room of the Senate Appropriations Commitee. On hand for the ceremony were (from left to right): David Corbin, Paul Sperry (OAH Leadership Advisory Council member) and his son Will, Lee White (Executive Director of the National Coalition for History), Nell Irvin Painter, Senator Byrd (seated), Lee Formwalt, Raymond Smock (director of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies at Shepherd University), Donald Ritchie (Associate Historian, U.S. Senate Historical Office), Allida Black (Editor of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers), Richard Baker (Historian, U.S. Senate Historical Office), and Betty Koed. Born in North Carolina in 1917 and raised in the coal mining regions of West Virginia, Byrd belongs to history as a former Klansman and opponent of desegregation in the earlier part of his career in the West Virginia House of Delegates from 1946, the U.S. House of Representatives from 1952, and the United States Senate from 1958. In the 1970s Senator Byrd joined the Senate leadership. He was elected Senate Democratic Whip in 1971 and Senate Democratic Leader in 1977 and served as majority leader from 1977 to 1981, and again from 1985 to 1989. Currently he chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee and serves as President Pro Tempore of the Senate, positions he also held from 1989 to 1995 and again from 2001 to 2003. Since 2002 he has distinguished further as an eloquent opponent of the Bush administration’s attack of Iraq and concentration of federal power in the executive branch at the expense of Congress. Senator Byrd’s reorientation occurred as he gained further education by attending the American University Law School at night while serving as a United States Senator (graduating in 1963) and receiving a B.A. in political science from Marshall University in 1994. The OAH recognizes Senator Byrd’s service to history as an author and a legislator. In 2001 he established the “Teaching American History” grants program for the improvement of the teaching of American History—as distinct from social studies—in public schools. Since its inception “Teaching American History” has awarded more than a half-billion federal dollars to school systems around the country to foster the teaching of American history. Senator Byrd has also encouraged awareness of the importance of the U.S. Constitution and the establishment of an Office of History within the Department of Homeland Security. The first volume of The Senate, 1789–1989: Addresses on the History of the Senate, a four-volume collection of Senator Byrd’s speeches on various aspects of the Senate’s history, won the Society for History in the Federal Government’s Henry Adams Prize. He also published The Senate of the Roman Republic: Addresses on the History of Roman Constitutionalism (1995). Our OAH party met Senator Byrd in the hearing room of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which he chairs. Most of us sat on one side of a large table while Senator Byrd stood and addressed us, shaking gently from Parkinson’s disease. He sat young Will Sperry on his right, periodically reaching over to touch the boy in indication of youth’s importance. I found riveting Senator Byrd’s recitation of his history with history, beginning in a two-room school house in the southern West Virginia coal fields, where his teacher Mr. W.J.B. Cormany awakened a life-long love of the field. I also surveyed the room’s wall paintings. Thanks to my last fall semester’s art history course, I recognized the second style of ancient Roman wall painting, to which images of floating white women added a twentieth-century U.S.-American touch. Senator Byrd delivered a stirring, twentieth-century vindication of the study of American history: As a consequence of Mr. Cormany’s teaching, Byrd said, “history has been my constant, close companion throughout my life. As a young boy, I found strength in the convictions of great Americans from the past. I learned how men such as George Washington, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin possessed a passion for freedom, and how they risked their lives to ensure independence for our nation. I learned how the legislative giants of American history, Senators like Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, helped to promote and protect our constitutional system of government.” This introduction led him into a spirited denunciation—“Hear me now!”—of the Bush administration’s monarchical abuse of power. Now more than ever, he said, the lessons of the American Revolution needed heeding. Now more than ever, the Constitution’s intentional separation of powers must be respected. Now more than ever, democracy needed to correct the abuse of power by a leader taking himself for a king. Sitting directly across the table from Byrd as OAH president-elect and representative of the executive board that had voted to recognize Senator Byrd as this year’s Friend of History, I also nodded along with him personally as a citizen. I have welcomed Byrd’s criticism of the Iraq war and its assaults on human rights in the name of the amorphous “war on terrorism.” Four years ago, Senator Byrd stood practically alone in the U.S. Congress as a voice against the war. At the same time I was surprised to hear something more in these words so suited to our times. An echo of the mid-twentieth-century American past whispered to me that this defense against central power may well have sprung from a source older than the presidency of George W. Bush. More than half a century ago that source, call it states’ rights, may have nourished a resistance to executive power then promoting black civil rights. Back then, I heard Senator Byrd as someone speaking against, rather than for, my interests as an American. Today, however, we are on the same side. In the early twenty-first century, his states’ rights source nourishes a resistance of executive power that I hear as a vindication of my interests as an American. I have not lived nearly as long as Senator Robert Byrd, for he was born in the same year as my mother. But I have lived long enough to see fundamental changes in the laws governing our national life. Now that the issues that earlier divided us no longer appear in American law, Senator Byrd’s defiance of centralized power appeals to me. I meant it when I thanked him as both a historian and a citizen of the United States of America.
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