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Evan Bayh was born in 1955 and grew up largely in Shirkieville, Indiana, the son of Senator Birch Bayh and grandson of basketball coach Birch Bayh Sr. He attended St. Albans School in Washington, earned a business degree at Indiana University Bloomington and a law degree at the University of Virginia, and clerked for U.S. District Judge James Noland. In 1986 he survived a Republican challenge to h...

Herb Kohl was born in Milwaukee in 1935 to Max and Mary Kohl, Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia who arrived in the 1920s with nothing. He attended Washington High School, graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1956, where his roommate was future baseball commissioner Bud Selig, and earned a Harvard MBA in 1958 before serving in the Army Reserve. With his brother he grew the f...

For more than a century, Americans did not vote for their U.S. senators. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Wilson alone argued for popular election and lost 10 to 1, so state legislatures chose senators, a design meant to shield the states from federal overreach and give the Senate a House of Lords style distance from public passions. In practice the system produced long deadlocks an...

Warren Magnuson was born in 1905 in Moorhead, Minnesota, with sealed birth records, and was adopted by William and Emma Magnuson, Scandinavian immigrants who ran a bar. After his adoptive father left, he played quarterback, captained the baseball team, delivered telegrams and rode freight trains into Canada to work on wheat threshing crews. In 1925 he followed a high school girlfriend to Seattle,...

Walter Mondale was born in 1928 in Ceylon, Minnesota, the son of a Methodist minister who preached social justice and civil rights through years of family poverty. After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1951 he enlisted in the Army during the Korean War, serving at Fort Knox, and used the GI Bill to pay for law school. At 20 he organized a conservative district for Hubert Humphrey's...

Tim Johnson was born in December 1946 in Canton, South Dakota, and raised in Vermillion. He earned his bachelor's, master's and law degrees at the University of South Dakota and, thanks to the state's diploma privilege, never had to take the bar exam. He served as a Clay County deputy state's attorney, entered the South Dakota House in 1979 and the state Senate in 1983, then won the state's at-lar...

S.I. Hayakawa was born in Vancouver in 1906 to Japanese immigrant parents and schooled in Calgary and Winnipeg, earning degrees from the University of Manitoba and McGill before a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin in 1935. In 1936 he joined a four person Japanese Canadian delegation to Ottawa seeking the vote, which was denied in British Columbia and therefore federally; committee me...

Aaron Burr was born in 1756, grandson of theologian Jonathan Edwards and son of the president of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton. By age two he had lost his father, grandfather, mother and grandmother. He entered Princeton at 13 and graduated at 16, then joined the Continental Army, marching to Quebec, where he tried to carry General Montgomery's body from the snow, and clashing with Geor...

Stuart Symington was born in Massachusetts in 1901 and raised in Baltimore. He enlisted as a private at 17 in World War I and became one of the Army's youngest second lieutenants, though the war ended before he went overseas. After Yale and a string of manufacturing jobs he married Evelyn Wadsworth, and in 1938 he took over Emerson Electric in St. Louis, turning it into the world's largest maker o...

Lewis Cass was born in Exeter, New Hampshire in 1782, the son of Bunker Hill veteran Jonathan Cass, and moved with his family to Marietta, Ohio in 1800. He practiced law in Zanesville, helped found the Grand Lodge of Ohio, entered the Ohio House in 1806 and became a U.S. Marshal under Thomas Jefferson. In the War of 1812 he led the 3rd Ohio Volunteer Regiment near Fort Malden, where General Willia...

John C. Frémont was born out of wedlock in Georgia in 1813 after his mother Anne left her older husband for French Canadian tutor Charles Fremon. Expelled from the College of Charleston for irregular attendance, he found a patron in Joel R. Poinsett, taught math in the Navy and joined the Army's Topographical Corps. He secretly married Jessie Benton, daughter of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton...

This episode reads the Wikipedia disambiguation page for Paul Douglas as a biography of a name, arranging a dozen notable people chronologically from 1892 to 1997. The earliest entries sit inside American institutions: Paul Douglas, born 1892 and died 1976, an economist who became a U.S. senator from Illinois; Paul P. Douglas Jr., born 1919, an Air Force officer; Paul L. Douglas, born 1927, who be...

Salmon P. Chase was born in New Hampshire in 1808, lost his father at nine, and was sent to Ohio to live with his uncle, Episcopal bishop Philander Chase. After Dartmouth he studied law under Attorney General William Wirt and opened a practice in Cincinnati in 1829. The deaths of three wives pushed him toward abolition, and critics called him the attorney general for fugitive slaves after cases su...

John Tyler was born in 1790 on the 1,200 acre Greenway Plantation in Virginia, the son of a judge and governor who had roomed with Thomas Jefferson in college. He entered the preparatory branch of William & Mary at 12, graduated at 17, and was admitted to the bar at 19 when the judge forgot to ask his age. A strict constructionist in the Virginia House of Delegates, the U.S. House and the Sena...

Andrew Jackson was born in 1767 in the Waxhaws on the border of North and South Carolina, weeks after his father died. During the Revolution his brother Hugh died after a battle, and at 14 Jackson was captured with his brother Robert. When he refused to shine a British officer's boots, the officer slashed him across the head and hand. Robert died of smallpox after their release, and their mother E...

William Rufus King was born in North Carolina in 1786, studied at the University of North Carolina and won a seat in the U.S. House in 1810 at age 24, turning 25 before the 12th Congress convened in November 1811. After diplomatic posts in Naples and Russia, he moved to the Alabama Territory in 1818 and built the Chestnut Hill plantation on the Alabama River. His family became one of the largest s...

Ralph Flanders was born in 1880 and grew up on subsistence farms in Vermont and Rhode Island. With college out of reach, he finished high school in 1896 and entered a two year apprenticeship at the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Company, then taught himself Greek, German, French and Latin. After five years editing the trade magazine Machinery in New York and a nervous breakdown in 1909, he moved...

This episode examines a Wikipedia disambiguation page for the name Paula Hawkins, a short routing document that exists because two notable women share the same name. The first entry is Paula Hawkins the politician, who lived from 1927 to 2009 and served as a U.S. Senator from Florida. The page defines her with three tags: her profession, her lifespan and her Senate seat, a closed historical record...

William F. Knowland was born in 1908 in Alameda, California, heir to a lumber fortune and son of Joseph R. Knowland, a congressman and publisher of the Oakland Tribune; his mother died less than a month after his birth. At 12 he gave campaign speeches for Harding and Coolidge, married at 19, finished UC Berkeley in three and a half years, and won a state Assembly seat at 25. Drafted in 1942, he ro...

Karl Mundt was born in 1900 in Humboldt, South Dakota, earned an economics degree from Carleton College in 1923, and taught speech, psychology, sociology and government at Bryant High School while coaching debate, soon becoming superintendent. He married Mary in 1924, both earned master's degrees at Columbia, and by 1928 they taught at what is now Dakota State University. He was national president...

Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina and Daniel Webster of New England dominated American politics from roughly 1828 to 1852, the era of the second party system. Clay, who had served as defense counsel for Aaron Burr in his treason trial, was elected Speaker of the House as a freshman in the 12th Congress, and he and fellow freshman Calhoun led the War Hawks who pushed for the...

In February 1950 in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed to hold a list of 205 Communist Party members working in the State Department. When Republicans took the Senate in 1953 he chaired the Committee on Government Operations and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, hiring 26 year old Roy Cohn as chief counsel, Robert F. Kennedy as assistant counsel, and hotel heir G....

Albert Gallatin was born in Geneva in 1761 to a wealthy aristocratic family, was orphaned young, and was educated at the Academy of Geneva, where he absorbed Rousseau, Voltaire and the French physiocrats. In 1780, at 19, he and a classmate slipped away and sailed to America, where he traded in Machias, Maine, tutored French at Harvard, and then built a stone house called Friendship Hill on 400 acr...

Daniel J. Evans was born in Seattle in 1925 to a family that reached Washington Territory in 1859. An Eagle Scout and scout camp hike master, he went through the Navy V-12 program, served as an ensign on Pacific aircraft carriers after World War II, and returned to service during the Korean War. With two civil engineering degrees from the University of Washington, he helped design Seattle's double...

James Monroe enrolled at the College of William and Mary at 16, then left and joined classmates in raiding the royal governor's palace in Williamsburg for muskets and swords for the Virginia militia. At 18, as a Continental Army lieutenant at the Battle of Trenton on December 26, 1776, he took a musket ball that severed an artery and survived. He wintered at Valley Forge sharing a hut with John Ma...