Former US Congressmen and former Mayor of Dallas Steve Bartlett served as the opening Keynote Speaker at MyoCon: TMA’s Global Myositis Patient Conference in Dallas. Bartlett, who was introduced by Mindy Henderson, Vice President of Disability Outreach and Empowerment at the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA), was principally responsible for the passage 35 years ago of the Americans with Disabilities ACT (ADA).
In the hour plus of his address, including taking questions from the packed auditorium at the Sheraton Dallas Hotel, it became obvious how Bartlett, in eight short years as a member of the US House of Representatives, passed 18 significant pieces of legislation including the ADA, the civil rights law for those with disabilities. He not only discussed clearly and entertainingly how to use the power of purpose to achieve great objectives, he embodied a formidable purposeful power.
“Start with your purpose in mind,” Bartlett said. “Indeed, write it down to achieve clarity. Then relentlessly seek to achieve that purpose. Do so with integrity and values, of course, adjusting along the way as facts change, but keep focused on the purpose. You may not achieve exactly what you wrote down, but you often will, and you’ll come a lot closer than if you had not identified your purpose.”
“The Myositis Association has a purpose,” he added. “My challenge to you is to carefully consider and review those purposes. Write them down. Set a time to achieve milestones. Print your purpose on your letterhead, business cards, and website. Tattoo them on your forehead if necessary. Start every conversation with your purpose. Set annual milestones for achieving your purpose so you can measure your success.”
Awareness came early
Bartlett credits his father, an engineer, with instilling in him the need to be purposeful. “My dad put me in charge of our first calf, a one-week old calf named Little Red,” he said. “Little Red died of pneumonia within a week in a cold, rainy, three-day storm. As I was in charge of that calf my father was clear with me: if you had fed the calf with warm milk dipped on a rag, if you had changed the haybed straw ten times a day instead of once, if you had brought Little Red inside the house in front of a warm stove and slept with both of you wrapped in blankets, Little Red would have lived.”
“Cruel to say to a five-year old, perhaps,” Bartlett added. “But the lesson of doing everything you can to achieve your purpose never left me.”
Purpose in politics
Bartlett rarely can remember when he was not interested in politics and what it could achieve to improve the lives of others. Politics was always discussed at home. While he was in high school, he was elected President of the Young Republicans for all of Dallas. He met his future wife Gail at a Republican Club bake sale and the two attended the University of Texas in Austin. In Bartlett’s freshmen year, he was elected vice chairman of the Texas Young Republicans. Bartlett and Gail married after their sophomore year in college.
At 24, Bartlett became chairman of Dallas’ Urban Rehab Board and President of the Dallas County Republican Men’s Club. In 1977, when he was 30, he was elected to the Dallas City Council. Four years later, he was elected to represent Texas’s third Congressional District, northeast of Dallas.
Few members of Congress are responsible for any signature legislation in their first term. This is especially true for members of a minority party. Being purposeful, however, Bartlett interviewed a hundred incumbent members of Congress to understand how he could become an effective member of Congress. Within his first ninety days in office, he succeeded in passing an amendment to let the market set Federal Housing Authority interest rates.
He also sought a seat on the Select Education Subcommittee, the smallest subcommittee in the House of Representatives and a committee unsought by high profile Congressional members. The subcommittee had jurisdiction over identifying barriers of independence for persons with disabilities. The chair of the committee asked Bartlett to write what the purpose of the subcommittee should be.
“I adopted language from the Presidential Commission on the Handicapped Towards Independence, which was our blueprint for disability legislation,” he said. “I passed eight laws towards that independence, and that all led to the Americans for Disabilities Act (ADA) passed in 1990.”
Congressman Barlett is featured in the new documentary Change, Not Charity: The Americans with Disabilities Act on PBS and streaming on PBS.org.
ADA became possible when George H. W. Bush became president, and Bartlett was now member of the majority party in the House. Years of working with Democrats when they were in charge of the House now encouraged Democrats to support passage of the ADA.
“We were all totally focused on writing Civil Rights legislation that would have broad public support, be immune from legal challenges, and create much greater independence for that 20 percent of the population living with disabilities,” Bartlett said. “Is the ADA perfect? No. But we’ve come a long way in the last 35 years. Employment, transportation, education, housing, sidewalks, computers, healthcare are all vastly different and more accessible today than in 1990.”
“One statistic is often overlooked,” he added. “At the passage of the ADA, the employment rate for those of working age with disabilities was about 23 percent. Today it’s about 38 percent. Still short of full employment, but an employer cannot discriminate and has to provide reasonable accommodation.”
The pull of greater purpose
After nine years in Congress having written and passed 18 pieces of legislation, Bartlett was presented with an opportunity to run for mayor of Dallas. “The City of Dallas had fallen on hard times,” he said. “Hard to believe given Dallas’s incredible success now. But downtown Dallas had not had a new employer move in for ten years and had lost 100,000 jobs. Violent crime had increased in every single category. Worse, the city had lost belief in itself.”
Again, Bartlett employed the power of purpose. In his inaugural address as mayor, he pledged his administration would reduce the number of violent crimes in all four categories within one year. He achieved that in five months. Another purpose was to bring new employers to the downtown. The first one signed a lease in downtown Dallas within 45 days of Bartlett being mayor.
He currently is putting final touches on a non-fiction book titled AH AH! The Power Of Purpose. The book is scheduled for publication in October. “Getting the message out to others on how to better put power into their purposes is my purposeful purpose. All of you involved with The Myositis Association, those experiencing the daily myositis journey, physicians, healthcare providers, clinical researchers, TMA Executive Director Paula Eichenbrenner and her staff, and TMA ‘s directors, all of you have a shared purpose and I am grateful and honored to have had the opportunity to be somewhat useful to you.”
Stanford Erickson is a veteran journalist, author, and playwright. A longtime member of the National Press Club, he covered US presidents and global leaders for over 40 years. He’s written books on politics, leadership, and spirituality. His wife, Nancy Marx Erickson, leads TMA’s WomenWithIBM Affinity Group.
