MUSKIE, Edmund Sixtus

(b. 28 March 1914 in Rumford, Maine; d. 26 March 1996 in Washington, D.C.), governor and U.S. senator who led the passage of key environmental legislation.

Muskie was the second of six children born to Stephen Muskie, a tailor, and Josephine (Czarnecka) Muskie, a homemaker, in Rumford, a mill town in western Maine. Like other Maine communities, Rumford was dominated by a paper factory (Oxford Paper Company), which fouled the air with smoke and the local water source with industrial pollutants. Growing up, Muskie could hardly have been oblivious to these environmental abuses or to the town's dependence on the paper mill as its chief employer. A shy youngster, Muskie became an avid reader, a practice encouraged by his Polish-born father, who had taught himself to read and write English. His father's intense interest in contemporary politics also impressed his son, who later explained that he was prepared to run for the Maine legislature in part "because of my father's general interest in public affairs." Muskie's concern for the environment stemmed initially from fishing expeditions with his father in the Maine wilderness. Muskie attended the Pettingill School and Stephens High School and won a scholarship to Bates College, a small liberal arts college in Lewiston, Maine. He graduated in 1936 with a B.A. in history, having been class president and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He attended Cornell Law School, earning his LL.B. in 1939, and returned to Maine to open a practice in Waterville. In 1942 he joined the U.S. Navy as a junior officer and served abroad the USS Brackett in the Atlantic and Pacific. He was discharged in 1945, and in 1948 he married Jane Gray, with whom he would have five children.

Although he was a first-generation Polish-American Catholic in a state dominated by a Protestant Republican establishment, Muskie ran for the state legislature in 1946. Surprisingly, he was elected and was again in 1948 and 1950. Between 1951 and 1952 he was state director of the Office of Price Stabilization and in 1954, after an arduous campaign, convincingly defeated the incumbent Republican to become governor of Maine. Muskie served two terms (1955–1959), during which he was associated prominently with the issue of "water improvement." He insisted on the importance of upgrading Maine's compromised water quality; at the same time, however, he was equally conscious of industry's place in the state's economic life.

Already a widely popular figure in Maine, Muskie decided to run for the U.S. Senate in 1958 and easily defeated the Republican incumbent. He would remain a senator until 1980. Shortly after his arrival in Washington, D.C., in 1959, Muskie angered the Senate majority leader, Lyndon B. Johnson, by refusing to support his strategy to modify Senate filibustering rules. Johnson punished Muskie by appointing him to the Public Works Committee. In 1963, however, the Public Works chairman, Pat McNamara, created a new subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution and named Muskie as chairman. Rather than complain about ill treatment, Muskie made the most of his appointment, focusing at first on clean air, a subject that none of the mainstream environmental organizations had incorporated into its agenda. Muskie built a clean air constituency by holding hearings in major cities across the country, including Los Angeles, where a serious smog problem had developed. He became the preeminent authority on clean air and on other environmental issues. His first success came with the 1963 Clean Air Act, a noncontroversial measure that provided federal matching grants to states and localities to develop air pollution control programs.

The 1965 Clean Air Act was more controversial, as it established federal carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon standards for motor vehicles. And the 1970 Clean Air Act set still more stringent federal standards. Automobile manufacturers complained that developing the required technology would make new cars prohibitively expensive, if indeed such technology were possible. Muskie was unmoved by the automakers' lamentations; he was convinced that they could comply with the law and that they could do so at a reasonable cost. The automotive industry responded by using the catalytic converter. In short, Muskie recognized his and Congress's responsibility to protect the physical environment without endangering the American economy.

Muskie's reputation as "Mr. Clean" was enhanced further by the passage of the 1965 Water Quality Act and the 1966 Clean Water Restoration Act, which together mandated that states enforce water-quality standards for interstate waterways within their boundaries. The 1968 Clean Water Restoration Act also provided federal funds for the construction of sewage-treatment plants and established water-quality standards for the noninterstate waters.

In 1968 Muskie stepped away briefly from his Senate position to become the running mate of Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic Party's presidential nominee. Together they waged a strong campaign while enduring the damaging fallout from divisions over the Vietnam War, the stormy and riotous Democratic convention in Chicago, strident student protestors, and the difficulty of supporting President Johnson's hard line toward North Vietnam, not to mention the shortage of funding for television commercials. Muskie made scores of appearances in urban ghettos, union halls, and college campuses. His quiet manner, Lincolnesque demeanor, and understated sense of humor won supporters for the Democratic ticket. In November, however, Richard M. Nixon, the Republican presidential candidate, prevailed by a narrow margin.

After the 1968 campaign Muskie resumed his duties in the Senate, although he did launch an ill-fated run for the presidency in 1972 that was undermined by "dirty tricks" engineered by the Nixon White House. In 1980, at the request of President Jimmy Carter, he left the Senate to replace Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who had resigned to protest an abortive raid to rescue American hostages held in Iran. Muskie appeared once more on the national scene in 1986 to join a three-person commission appointed by President Ronald Reagan to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, a covert operation to gain the release of American captives in the Middle East by the sale of arms to Iran. He died of a heart attack a decade later and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.

Muskie's major legislative accomplishments in the 1960s were the Clean Air and the Clean Water Acts that he shepherded through the Senate between 1965 and 1970. Was he himself satisfied with these laws? To a certain extent he was, declaring in Journeys that "we've written some good legislation." Nonetheless, he was not deluded about the limitations of his handiwork, for he also acknowledged that Americans "have produced pollution faster than we have [moved against it]." In a sense, that bluntly honest and unsettling assessment is as important a contribution to the environmental movement as the legislation itself.

The Edmund S. Muskie Archives is located at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. The archives also maintains a Muskie oral history project. Edmund S. Muskie, Memorial Tributes Delivered in Congress: Edmund S. Muskie, 1914–1996 (1996), contains Muskie's mixed review, a generation after their passage, of the effectiveness of the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. Muskie's memoir, Journeys (1972), provides the fullest account of the origins of his environmental conscience. Theo Lippman and Donald C. Hauser, Muskie (1971), offers a satisfactory account of his governorship and Senate career until 1970. Bernard Asbell, The Senate Nobody Knows (1978), is a richly detailed study of the passage of the 1975 Clean Air Act. Obituaries are in the New York Times and Washington Post (both 27 Mar. 1996).

Richard Harmond