Progressive Party (a/k/a the Bull Moose Party)

Edward B. Burling: The Character of the Man

This series about the life of Edward B. (“Ned”) Burling commenced with a post about his connections with Katherine Graham, the owner and publisher of the Washington Post, and then retreated in time to a post about his birth and early years in Iowa, 1870-1890, followed by a post about his four years at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1890-1894, another post about his 22 years as a Chicago attorney, 1895-1917, a post about his two years as a federal government attorney in Washington, D.C., 1917-1918 and another about his 48 years as a prominent private attorney in Washington D.C., 1919-1966. The last highlighted his long friendship with Learned Hand, a notable federal judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Now we examine Burling’s overall character. [1]

Burling’s Generosity

Ned accumulated substantial wealth through the practice of law and investments, and his generosity was shown by his gift of $700,000 to his alma mater, Grinnell College, towards the Burling Library‘s total cost in 1959 of $1.3 million ($6.0 million of $11.1 million in February 2018 dollars) But he insisted the Library not be named after him; instead, as the original plaque at its entrance stated, it was named “in memory of Lucy B. Burling 1841-1936,” the benefactor’s mother.

He also made other direct, usually anonymous, gifts to the College plus financing some students’ expenses. In short, he was a major contributor to the College. Other gifts to the College by his second wife and widow, Bertha Blake Burling, were the Burling mansion in the Embassy Row area of Washington, D.C. and their Maine summer cottage.

Burling also endowed the College’s Linn Smith Prize for Excellence in Mathematics. Smith was a native Iowan and a 1920 honors math graduate of Grinnell who drowned while taking care of Burling’s two young sons at New Hampshire’s Cornish Colony and whom Burling unsuccessfully tried to rescue. Burling was very upset about the drowning and said that Smith was “sweet tempered, devoted and unselfish. If he had been meaner or more faithless, or selfish he would have survived. . . . He had this notion which poor boys that go to Grinnell are apt to get, that is they glory in sacrificing themselves, go without food, go without pleasure, generally go without and your record is sure. I say the only consequence of that philosophy is that you get nothing.”

His generosity was not limited to the College. He anonymously helped other young people attend other colleges and cope with other necessities. After his death, his widow endowed the Edward B. Burling Chair in International Law and Diplomacy at The Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. Ned along with Paul Nitze (a U.S. diplomat) and Christian Herter (another U.S. Secretary of State) had helped to establish this School in the 1940’s, and Burling had served on its Advisory Council until his death. In similar vein, some of his friends established a scholarship in his name at the Harvard Law School.

Burling’s Other Qualities

After his death some of his friends added their tributes. Dean Acheson, his law partner and former Secretary of State, said that Burling often gave the impression of “being tough, and worldly, and cynical and brutal,” but he really was generous, warm and compassionate. Burling was known, said Acheson, for a “rare originality and power of mind, a teasing sardonic wit and willful friendships and dislikes.”

Thomas Gardiner Corcoran described his friend as “Poet born, his poetic imagination penetrated everything he touched–the breakthrough of the Bull Moose movement–the law firm he transmuted from a ‘dusty answer’ to the excitement of a 51st state–the self-regenerating waves of compassionate intelligence he se moving as a part of all he met–and he met everybody.” In addition, Corcoran noted, “Uncle Ned lived beyond himself in the hundreds of younger men he gave courage to outdo themselves in confidence of his never-failing support win or lose.”

In similar vein, another friend, John Lord O’Brian, said, “His deep personal interest in the affairs of [C&B} . . . and the selection of partners and associates became his chief interest. This, however, did not prevent his accumulating a group of remarkable friends chiefly in the field of public affairs. His quizzical humor and occasional affectations of worldliness concealed a curiously sensitive and compassionate nature, and gave a unique flavor to his personality. Always reticent about his personal affairs, he was singularly generous in his gifts and discriminating in his help to innumerable individuals.”

The Burling genealogist described Ned as “[a]ambitious and brilliant . . .; personable, charming, and gregarious (many friends and acquaintances of high standing); robust; outspoken and humorous . . .; largely generous.” On the other hand, according to the genealogist, he was “careless of personal relationships, and evidently not too well suited to monogamy.” Indeed, he once shocked a young relative by asking what she thought about his having had many extramarital affairs.

One of his closest friends concluded that Ned was exceptional in “his extraordinary capacity for drawing into the circle of his friendship men gifted with unusual intellectual perceptiveness” or “men of extraordinary ability.” The previous list of frequent guests at Burling’s Cabin is but a brief glimpse at this circle of friendship. Ned was also skillful in “drawing out the views of other people while he himself listened” and “the interplay of his whimsical humor that produced the charm and the flavor.”

Conclusion

Humble or modest he was not. At age 96, he said, “I was a piece of good luck for father, mother, brother and two sisters. To some extent, some more and some less, they were benefited by my being in the world.”

The concluding post in this series will share this blogger’s joy in researching and writing about Burling (and another Grinnell College eminent alumnus, Joseph Welch).

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[1[ Citations to the sources for this post are found in this blogger’s Edward Burnham Burling, The College’s Quiet Benefactor (April 2008)(18-page essay and bibliography; on file in Grinnell College’s Special Collections and Archives).

Edward B. Burling: The Chicago Attorney, 1895-1917

The Chicago Attorney

After finishing Harvard Law School with such a distinguished record, Ned had high hopes of obtaining a job as a young lawyer and earning good money. But that did not happen, given the law firm practices of the day.

Instead in 1895 he started with a Chicago firm at barely more money than he had made in 1887 at the Eldora grocery store. He continued to engage in the private practice of law in Chicago plus serving as Assistant Corporation Counsel for the City of Chicago through 1917, eventually making more money doing the typical work of most lawyers of the time and engaging in profitable real estate development in the Winnetka area on the North Shore.

He got married in 1902 to Louisa Green Peasley, the daughter of a wealthy and well connected Chicago businessman, and they had two sons, Edward Burling Jr. (1908) and John L. Burling (1912). But Ned was bored with his Chicago life.

In his efforts to leave Chicago, Burling in 1915 sought the Washington, D.C. position of General Counsel of the then new Federal Trade Commission with the support of Louis D. Brandeis, then a practicing Boston attorney, and Cyrus McCormick, the son of the inventor of the grain reaper and the owner of the International Harvester Company. But Ned did not receive the appointment and thus remained in Chicago for the next two years.

During his Chicago years, however, Burling got a taste of politics. In 1896 he was a spectator at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to hear William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, and in 1912 Burling was active in the Bull Moose Party that nominated Theodore Roosevelt for President. His allegiance to “the Rough Rider” persisted. In 1921, he told Learned Hand that Ned agreed “with everything that T.R. ever said” on political subjects, and throughout his life Ned often joked that he was that Party’s sole survivor.

In the summer of 1911 Burling and his family spent the summer at the Cornish Colony in Cornish/Plainfield, New Hampshire and later bought a summer home in the Colony where they went every summer. It was a gathering place for artists, musicians, writers, journalists, lawyers and businessmen, including Judge Learned Hand (Ned’s great friend), Ethel Barrymore and President Woodrow Wilson.

Shortly before Burling left Chicago in 1917, he made an investment that proved to be one of the most important events in his life. He started a small surplus trading company that eventually became one of the largest metal-cutting tool manufacturers in the U.S.[1]

Conclusion

The next chapter of this recounting of the life of Burling will cover his two years as a federal government attorney in Washington, D.C.

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[1] Citations to the sources for this post are found in this blogger’s Edward Burnham Burling, The College’s Quiet Benefactor (April 2008)(18-page essay and bibliography; on file in Grinnell College’s Special Collections and Archives).

Katherine Graham’s Connections with Harry Hopkins and Edward B. Burling

As the owner and publisher of the Washington Post in the current move, “The Post,” Katherine Graham, as played by Meryl Streep, is an important participant in the real-life drama of the Post’s publication in 1971 of the Pentagon Papers. The film also has glimpses of her involvement in the Washington social scene, including friendships with John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Robert F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and Nancy Reagan among many others. Below are photographs of Graham herself and of Meryl Street as Graham.

Graham’s memoir, Personal History from 1997, mentions her connections in 1941 with Harry Hopkins (HH) and Edward Burling, both Grinnell College alums.[1] Their photographs are below.

U.S. Preparation for War, 1941

In or about late May 1941 Katherine’s husband, Phillip (“Phil”) Graham, was finishing clerkships for U.S. Supreme Court Justices Stanley F. Reed (1939-40) and Felix Frankfurter (1940-41) and finding his next position in the midst of the increasing threat of the U.S.’ becoming involved in what became World War Ii. In that search Phil met with Robert Lovett, then Assistant Secretary of War for Air, who suggested Phil see about working for HH, who was President Roosevelt’s principal assistant.

That June Phil met with HH, who was in failing health, at his bedroom/office in the White House. HH immediately asked, “Why the hell aren’t you in the Army?” Phil responded that the Head of Naval Intelligence had advised him to wait a few months before deciding how to become directly involved in the war effort. Eventually HH suggested that Phil talk with Oscar Cox about working for him at the Lend-Lease Administration while spending three days a week with HH.

Phil already had tentative arrangements to work for Cox and did so shortly thereafter. Cox said that working directly for HH probably would not have worked out. According to Cox, “HH was a peculiar cuss, worked very irregularly, and probably would never get a real assistant.”

While at Lend-Lease, apparently in August 1941, Phil (age 26) and Joe Rauh, Jr.,(age 29), the latter of whom later became a prominent civil rights lawyer, sent a memo to President Roosevelt advising immediate and significant increases in U.S. production of bombers for the war. HH immediately responded: “You shouldn’t bother the President with things like this and besides it isn’t true.” Phil and Joe were worried that their Washington careers were over so they went to see Bob Nathan, director of research at the Office of Production Management and learned that U.S. production of bombers was even worse than they had thought.

That same summer, on a Sunday afternoon, Phil and Katherine went for lunch at the Virginia log cabin owned by Burling. Also present was Robert Patterson, the Undersecretary of War, and according to Katherine’s memoir, “the arguments on preparedness were being waged at the top of everyone’s lungs. Of course, I worried that Patterson was unused to this mode of discourse and would think that everyone arguing was insane, and when we got home I told Phil that their manners in front of this august figure had been appalling.” (Emphasis added.) Whose manners was she referencing? The Burlings? Everyone at the gathering except for Mr. Patterson?

Personal Involvement with Mr. Burling

In the Fall of 1959 while attending the Washington Semester at American University I called Mr. Burling to thank him for his generous donation to Grinnell College for its new library that is named in honor of his mother. At his invitation, I joined him at his law firm for an enjoyable conversation over coffee and then after being picked up by his personal chauffeur, at his Cabin on a Sunday afternoon. Little did I know at the time that such a Sunday afternoon had become a famous Washington institution. I do not recall our conversations other than my talking about my studies at Grinnell and AU, but I do remember how Burling, then 89 years old and clad in a wool plaid shirt, vigorously chopped wood on a beautiful fall afternoon. (Now I wish I had been journaling to document these meetings.)

Edward Burling’s Death[2]

On October 3, 1996, Edward B. Burling died at age 96 in Washington Hospital Center. According to an editorial in his honor in the Post that Graham may have helped write, Burling’s “greatest diversion was a primitive log cabin that he built some 40 years ago on the shore of the Potomac near McLean. During the ‘30s and ‘40’s the cabin served as a meeting place for scores of scholars and diplomats and leaders. ‘They would gather to chop wood, eat well, and settle the problems of the world,’” said one of his law partners.

His obituary in the Post also mentioned that his introduction to politics came when he sat on a rafter at the 1896 Chicago convention of the Democratic Party and heard William Jennings Bryan deliver his famous “Cross of Gold” speech. Later Burling supported Teddy Roosevelt’s presidential candidacy in 1912 for the Progressive Party (a/k/a the Bull Moose Party), and subsequently Burling often described himself as the sole survivor of that Party. A few months after the end of World War I, Burling co-founded what became the prominent Covington & Burling (“C&B”) law firm (n/k/a Covington). He strongly opposed FDR’s New Deal and often joked that the law firm’s success was due to those measures. He was a lifelong Republican yet was a strong supporter of Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential election against Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee.

The very unusual Post editorial about Burling that was simply entitled “Edward B. Burling” said he was the city’s “grand old man of the law [who from] the days when he was graduated from Harvard Law School in 1894, with one of the best records ever made there, he had been an outstanding legal scholar. And with the law as the base of his operations, he also exerted a substantial influence in the fields of business, government and community relations.”

The editorial also stated that at the C&B law firm the “scholarly and retiring Mr. Burling, who made a specialty of cultivating and training brilliant young lawyers, was chiefly responsible for keeping the firm’s performance at a high level of professional excellence.”

The Burling cabin captured further comment in the editorial. “For many years his cabin on the Potomac . . . was a center of cerebral ferment on Sunday afternoons. Following a morning tramp through the woods and a hearty meal he loved to join in lively debate with judges, lawyers, government officials and others in the quiet surroundings of ‘The Cabin.’ These sessions will long be remembered by a vast number of his associates and friends in high places.” The conclusion of the editorial stated, “His great achievement was not merely longevity, but a sustained flow of energy and ideas and a passionate interest in the problems of humanity. His monument is already built in the minds of his associates and in the annals of this world observation post.”

Conclusion

Inspired by my brief encounter with Mr. Burling, his generosity to our alma mater Grinnell College and my interest in history, I later conducted research about him and wrote his biographical sketch in The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law (p. 85) and a short article about him for The Grinnell Magazine and a longer essay that is on file with the College’s Archives.[3] These matters will be explored in subsequent posts.

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[1] Katherine Graham, Personal History at 133-35 (Knopf, 1997).

[2] Obituary, Edward F. [sic] Burling, dies at 96; Founder of District Law Firm, Wash. Post, p. B4 (Oct. 4, 1966); Editorial, Edward B. Burling, Wash. Post (Oct. 5, 1966).

[3] Edward Burnham Burling, Grinnell’s Quiet Benefactor, Grinnell Magazine, Summer 2009, at 21; Edward Burnham Burling, The College’s Quiet Benefactor (April 2008)( 18-page essay and bibliography; on file in Grinnell College’s Special Collections and Archives). The last of these has citations to the sources.