CHAPTER 1The Young Burnham
James Burnham was born in Chicago in 1905 into a wealthy family. His father Claude immigrated from England in the 1880s and settled in Chicago where he became a successful railroad executive.1 In 1904, Claude married Burnham's mother, Mary Mae Gillis.2 Claude was Protestant, Mary Mae was Catholic, and James was reared in the Catholic faith.
The life of the teenage James (Jim to those who knew him) Burnham bears an uncanny resemblance to one of the most famous protagonists of his youth, Amory Blaine of F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise. The novel took the nation by storm when it was published in 1920. Burnham would have easily identified with Blaine because Burnham was also a teenage, second-generation, Upper Midwesterner who was raised by a Catholic mother in relative wealth. Like Fitzgerald's character (or maybe because of him), Burnham aspired to be a writer. The year after This Side of Paradise was published, Burnham even moved to Connecticut to attend the same type of posh Catholic high school that Blaine had attended. It was called Canterbury School (John F. Kennedy briefly attended the school in 1930).
Burnham arrived there in 1921. The school probably appealed to the Burnhams because although it was Catholic, it still promoted Ivy League colleges, which traditional Catholic schools rarely did due to their Protestant heritage. Canterbury was unique for its time because it was run by Catholic laymen. Burnham would go on to receive some of the highest grades and test scores in Canterbury's school's history.3
An essay Burnham wrote as a student in 1923 was a harbinger of some of his significant political views. Burnham and his fellow classmates were asked, “Do present conditions in America stimulate the production of literature?” Burnham answered in the affirmative, predicting that the United States would be transformed by World War I. He wrote: “The Great War produced an upheaval of all economic and social conditions. It changed life in every way; it revivified existence; it gave renewed impetus to everything.”4 Optimistically he wrote: “Present conditions in America, however, are perhaps the greatest stimulus there has ever been to literature, to the production of real literature.”5 Burnham contended that young people especially would live to write.6
The essay's most remarkable feature, given Burnham's future intellectual development, is the idea that war leads to progress. Although nothing in the essay question about American literature suggested anything about war, the future Cold War hardliner makes this connection. During the early 1920s, most Americans saw World War I as a catastrophe—more than one hundred thousand Americans had died seemingly for nothing, but the teenage Burnham found redeeming features in the conflict. The idea that war could improve the world would be a hallmark of his thinking for almost a half-century.
After graduating high school, Burnham (like Fitzgerald's character Blaine) attended Princeton. This traditionally Protestant university was changing during the early twentieth century as Protestantism began losing its cultural, political, social, and intellectual hegemony in the United States. The influx of Jewish and, like the Burnhams, Catholic immigrants from Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century contributed to this change. By the 1920s, Princeton went from exclusively to mostly Protestant; Catholics and Jews by now made up almost 15 percent of the university's freshman class.7
Along with religious pluralism, secularism became widespread among American college students during this time. Religious unbelief spread like an epidemic. During the Roaring Twenties, many young adults rebelled against the Victorian values that seemingly led to the World War I calamity. Regular attendance at chapel services, which had been mandatory at Princeton since its birth, were reduced. Required biblical classes were jettisoned shortly before Burnham's arrival, too. A survey in 1927 (the year Burnham graduated) by the Daily Princetonian found that although most Princeton students rejected atheism, they slightly preferred agnosticism to theism.8 Around this time, Burnham would be in the minority who espoused atheism.9
Apolitical during his college years, the soon-to-be scholar invested much of his time in the study of literature and philosophy. In This Side of Paradise, Blaine remarks, “I’m in a superior class. You are, too. We’re philosophers.”10 Burnham, like Fitzgerald's character, wrote for Princeton's Nassau Literary Magazine. One of his stories, titled “Through a Glass, Darkly,” was written in 1925 when Burnham was nineteen. Flashes of the second gloomy James Burnham appear in this essay. It describes a man desperate to find a wife to bear him a child so he can pass on the family name and farm. In his thirties, the man meets a wonderful woman named Helen whom he marries, only to have her pass away during childbirth.11 For this James Burnham, any ray of light (such as the birth of a child) became a precursor to night; one would have to accept life's darker shades.
Burnham excelled at Princeton. One of his literary professors wrote that he had “without any question one the finest brains I have encountered in all my years at Princeton.”12 His extracurricular activities included tennis, golf, bridge, and a Catholic club.13 He boxed, too, and apparently threw a strong punch.14 Burnham never really stopped throwing punches; attacking others would become part of his writing style. He needed sparring partners.
After graduating from Princeton at the top of his class, the budding intellectual matriculated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied with one of the twentieth century's great Catholic thinkers, Martin D’Arcy. By now Burnham had left the Catholic faith, but the Jesuit priest still influenced him. D’Arcy wrote St. Thomas Aquinas (1930), The Nature of Belief (1931), and Belief and Reason (1946). D’Arcy used Aquinas's style of syllogisms when teaching.15 For Aquinas, reason buttressed faith, and the great Catholic scholastic employed the method of reason to understand the world several centuries before Enlightenment philosophers. Aquinas (drawing from Aristotle) would posit an argument, such as the following: “It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word God means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist.”16 He would then refute the argument, using reason. D’Arcy continued this approach, and so would the mature Burnham.
The emphasis on logical reasoning in the works of Aquinas and D’Arcy molded his intellectual development because Burnham would fashion himself a logician. More so than most intellectuals, Burnham excelled at exploiting logical weaknesses in others. He routinely employed syllogisms. And he practiced the scholastic method of disputation that involved presenting arguments that he may or may not have agreed with as a means to stimulate debate in search of truth. Burnham became steeped in the method of Aquinas and taught courses on him at New York University.17
The influence of Aquinas and D’Arcy may explain why although Burnham professed atheism for most of his adult life, he was not antireligion. He condemned many social phenomena in his life, but religion escaped his wrath, even as a young Marxist. His attitude toward religion resembled that of George Santayana, who, although an atheist, deemed religion a benign force with some redeeming characteristics. He respected spiritual life. For Santayana, religion had a social benefit, like poetry. He believed it should not be studied scientifically any more than should other pieces of literature. Santayana called himself an “aesthetic Catholic,” which was a good way to describe Burnham, who certainly read some of Santayana's works on religion at Princeton and Oxford.18
While Burnham was at Oxford, his father died at the early age of forty-seven. Burnham was twenty-two. His father's unexpected death was a shock, so Burnham had no time to prepare and say his goodbye. The event did provoke Burnham's brother, David, to write a quasi-biographical novel titled This Is Our Exile. Biographer Daniel Kelly called it a “literary semiportrait of [James] Burnham.”19 F. Scott Fitzgerald did not like the book, but it did interest Santayana, who wondered if the pessimism depicted in the book was a realistic depiction of American culture.20
The novel details the patriarch's death and its impact on the family. James Burnham provided inspiration for the character Fred, who is away studying in Europe at the time.21 Fred handles his father's death philosophically. He advises his mother shortly after his father's passing: “It's quite natural for you to feel a certain despondency. I don’t ask you to go around humming dance tunes. Your life has lost what, rightly or not, was its chief interest. The thing to do now is to develop other interests.”22 Like a young graduate student studying philosophy and literature, Burnham tried to rationalize his emotions. Given that he was beginning to enter a life of mind, the death of his father became just another topic to smugly apply the philosophical method.
Burnham's own apparent stoicism did not fool his family, however. His brother wrote in This Is Our Exile, “You have never heard Fred's motto: ‘Let nothing be necessary to you.’ Fred prides himself on the fact that he doesn’t want anybody. Fred has no emotions.”23 In response to this, another character perceptively replies: “You mean you can watch how excited he can get over a little horse-race and still not realize that, whatever he tries to do or tries not to do, Fred's one of the most emotional people—directly emotional—we know; much more so than your mother even.”24 The future philosophy professor may have presented himself as an even-keeled intellectual, but those closest to him knew better. His passions were never really concealed. Writing gave Burnham an outlet to release his emotions, always at the expense of some individual or idea.
In the summer of 1929, Burnham completed his schooling at Oxford and returned to the United States. The ensuing Great Depression had no direct impact on him. He secured a teaching position at a New York University satellite campus where he initially taught courses on Aquinas, Dante, aesthetics, and the Renaissance.25 Burnham also published one textbook, cowritten with his former philosophy professor Philip E. Wheelwright, titled Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (1932). Intended to train aspiring philosophers in the art of reasoning, the work is a study of basic philosophical concepts. It includes chapters on “Logical Structure,” “Factual Reasoning,” “Moral Values,” and “Religion.” The book calls Marx's dogmatic approach the opposite of the philosophical approach.26 Even the dialectal method is challenged.27 It would be Burnham's sole academic work.
He also collaborated with Wheelwright on Symposium, a journal intended to provide a forum for critical discussion about contemporary intellectual issues. This journal was his first real intellectual outlet after finishing school. Its inaugural issue, published in 1930, stated that its purpose was to study “ideas rather than events, with analysis rather than consequences.”28 The journal initially pledged not to promote any sect or cause, but the persistence of the Great Depression and American suffering changed this. One of Burnham's political overtures in 1931 was the study of Marxism. It condemned the philosophy as “perhaps the most degrading ideology that has ever been imposed on a large section of mankind.”29 The editor's opinion about the antibourgeois ideology would soon change.
This next phase in Burnham's intellectual development baffled his friends and biographers; many have wondered how someone so genteel could embrace revolutionary Marxism.30 One explanation is the Great Depression: economic crisis radicalized the young man. But personal circumstances should also be at least partly considered. In 1931, Burnham met a vivacious young woman named Martha Dodd, and they were engaged to be married.31 He wrote to her: “I remember your kisses soft light like a petal brushing like the wing brushes Dante's forehead … these times I remember.”32 But it was not to be. The engagement was broken off in early 1932 as she had been having an affair with another man.33 It seems Dodd never took Burnham and their engagement too seriously. It was the second time in four years that he had been abruptly abandoned by someone he loved. Could this trauma have helped radicalize the soon-to-be Marxist's political thought? Burnham himself insisted at the very end of his intellectual career that “political man … is seldom a rational animal. Confronting a political issue, most of us try to present our point of view with a respectable overlay of rational-sounding rhetoric, but you can still hear the drumbeats throbbing underneath.”34 Burnham, who would go from Marxist to one of America's most hardline anticommunists, insisted that deeper irrational forces guide the political writer.