Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,344
By This is the grave of James MacGregor Burns.
Born in 1918 in Melrose, Massachusetts, Burns grew up pretty wealthy and went to Williams College in 1939. He got a job as an aide for Abe Murdock, a Democratic congressman and future senator from Utah. Then he went to Harvard for a bit of graduate school. He wasn’t into it at the time though and he left after a year to take a job with the War Labor Board. He then was drafted into the Army where he served as a combat historian, which evidently was a thing. Whatever he did, he was in the Pacific and was awarded the Bronze Star, so presumably he was doing more than observing and scribbling notes. In any case, he went back to Harvard after the war, got his Ph.D. and joined the faculty back at Williams in 1947, where he would remain for the rest of his life.
Burns was a leading political scientist for a long time, working on the New Deal primarily. He also was a very active Democrat. In 1958, he ran for Congress from the western district of Massachusetts as a liberal Democrat. He did not win that election but he was a close ally of John F, Kennedy and did a lot of work to build up Protestant support for him in the state that was a precursor to JFK’s presidential campaign in 1960. Interestingly, Burns didn’t actually care for JFK much, or at least was unimpressed personally, and said so in a 1960 biographical piece on him that infuriated Jackie.
It really wasn’t until after 1960 that Burns became a popular writer. His early works were pretty slow in coming and mostly quite specific. He also wrote a textbook. But by the 60s, after his Kennedy biography, he became a leading writer for a liberal perspective that saw the structural issues in the American government as a problem long before the general Democratic population realized this stuff again in the 2000s. He thought the system of checks and balances in the government served inherently conservative interests, was deeply critical of the Supreme Court and demanded changes that would force retirement of justices after a certain age. He wanted to reform the Senate to make it population based instead of the undemocratic gaming of the system to allow sparsely populated right-wing states to control the government. He also wanted the repeal of the 22nd Amendment to allow presidents to serve for more than two terms. Later, he became a big thinker about leadership in government and wrote popularly about that too.
What I mostly know Burns for is his work on FDR and the New Deal. Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, 1940-1945, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971, as well as the Francis Parkman Prize, which is the American Historical Association award for best book in U.S. history. He also became one of these guys, like a more scholarly Bob Woodward, who would write about individual presidents or other big political figures in ways that brought in the checks and got the attention of the Beltway establishment. Edward Kennedy and the Camelot Legacy came out in 1976. Dead Center: Clinton-Gore Leadership and the Perils of Moderation, a co-authored book with Georgia Jones Sorenson, came out in 1999. His presidential leadership books also got a lot of attention, such as Running Alone: Presidential Leadership — JFK to Bush II: Why It Has Failed and How We Can Fix It, in 2006, and The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America, co-written with Susan Dunn (by this time his romantic partner), and released in 2001. Finally, he was generally infuriated with the weakness of Democrats and the corruption of our political institutions by conservative takeovers. This led to books such as The Democrats Must Lead: The Case for a Progressive Democratic Party, co-authored with William Crotty, in 1992, and Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court, in 2009. That latter title was his next to last. His last book, published in 2013, was Fire and Light: How the Enlightenment Transformed Our World.
By this time, Burns was very old. He died in 2014, at the age of 95.
James MacGregor Burns is buried in Williams College Cemetery, Williamstown, Massachusetts. This is one of the most hilarious cemeteries I’ve ever visited because everyone buried there in the last 30 years or so basically lists their c.v. on the gravestone. It’s like a bad academic meeting meets the afterlife.
If you would like this series to visit more winners of the Francis Parkman Prize, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Leon Litwack, who won in 1980 for Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery, is in El Cerrito, California, and William McFeely, who won in 1982 for Grant: A Biography, is in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.