PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY	 VOL. 159, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2015
JAMES MACGREGOR BURNS
3 august 1918 . 15 july 2014
[       476     ]
	 biographical memoirs
JAMES MACGREGOR BURNS, one of America’s preeminent political
historians, published the last of his books, Fire and Light: How
the Enlightenment Transformed Our World, in his ninety-fifth year.
He also grew his own blueberries, tended a garden, skied at first snowfall,
and went for an afternoon run through the Berkshires well into his 80s.
He lived quietly in a restored eighteenth century barn on his family’s
property, up a steep hill in the small town of Williamstown, Massachusetts,
where he lived all his adult life. He answered his phone himself—and
since he didn’t like good-byes—always closed with “Bye for now.”
Despite phone calls from the outside world from leadership
scholars, presidents, senators, high schoolers, and doctoral students, he
made time to write most every day for more than 60 years. He was a
beautiful writer; no, an extraordinarily beautiful one.
I recall my first trip to Williamstown to visit him, sitting on the
right side of the train on Amtrak’s Empire line that followed the
Hudson River north through Roosevelt country, reading Burns’
biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Lion and The Fox, and being
overcome with the beauty of his prose and the brilliance of his insights.
A cliché, but like diamonds, really.
His intellectual output was prodigious as well as methodical—he
understood American government as an intricate system, one
constructed with the foresight of the founders, with internal and
external checks and balances constantly adjusting to the muddle of
human drives and hidden motivations. To understand such complexity,
he looked at people, parties, movements, leaders, presidents, would-be
presidents, Congress, and the Supreme Court, as well as economic,
social, and cultural forces—every element in what he called the
American Experiment. Fire and Light, his last book, looked at the roots
of that experiment in the thinking of a small group of native
philosophers who boldly put Enlightenment ideals into practice. All
who cherish democracy owe these founders so much.
* * *
James MacGregor Burns was born 3 August 1918, in Melrose, Massachusetts.
His divorced mother raised him and his brothers out in the
country, and he adored the woods and streams and mountains. He
graduated from Williams College in 1939 and then worked on Capitol
Hill. During World War II, he served as an Army combat historian in
the Pacific theatre and was awarded the Bronze star. He loved the Army
and always noted he learned so much about leadership while serving.
He received his doctorate in government from Harvard University in
1947 and that year joined the faculty of his beloved alma mater,
james macgregor burns	 477
Williams College, later doing postdoctoral work at the London School
of Economics.
Studying Leadership
His first book, Congress on Trial: The Legislative Process and the
Administrative State (1949), is a critical appraisal of American
lawmaking and the legislative branch. He later returned to some of
these themes in Deadlock of Democracy, published in the last year of
the Kennedy administration. In Deadlock, he examined the impact of
political parties on American government. His thesis was that the
two-party system in the United States consisted of, in effect, four
parties, with Democrats and Republicans each having both a conservative
wing that dominated Congress—especially in major committees—
and a more liberal, activist wing that dominated presidential nominating
conventions.1 The result was a rudderless, deadlocked government, as
the tensions among the four parties compounded the checks and
balances the founders had erected between the executive and legislative
branches. In the jockeying for power, which would have the upper
hand? Where could the country turn for leadership that would address
its most pressing concerns?
Burns had an enduring, even passionate, bias for presidential leadership,
with its unifying, transformational potential. Franklin Roosevelt,
the hero of his youth, was the model of a president whose combination
of vision and strategic genius enabled him to overcome the constraints
on leadership built into the American system. Burns published an
exhaustive study of FDR in two groundbreaking volumes, Roosevelt:
The Lion and the Fox (1956) and Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom
(1970), which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
As Roosevelt’s biographer, Burns’ keen observations and insights
provided a rich vein to explore and craft his own ideas about
presidential leadership. He found in FDR a deeply complex man
whose political genius was to “keep open alternative lines of action, to
shift from one line to another as conditions demanded, to protect his
route to the rear in case he wanted to make a sudden retreat, and,
fox-like, to cross and snarl his trail in order to hide his real
intentions.”
“I was very interested in how Machiavellian he was,” Burns said
later. But that was only part of the story. FDR was also a great transformational
leader, one who brought profound and enduring change to
the benefit of common American citizens. “He was a manipulator,”
Burns wrote, “and at the same time, he had to be a lion. To what extent
did he use the tactics of a fox in order to advance the wishes of a lion?
478	 biographical memoirs
To what extent did he have to be a transactional leader to be able to
become a transforming leader?”2
Burns would develop these insights into a theory contrasting transforming
leaders, who motivate others through an appeal to conscience
and morality, and transactional leaders, who move incrementally,
through political give-and-take. Transactional leaders were the more
conventional politicians—horse traders—who drew followers by offering
jobs for votes, or support of important legislation in exchange for
campaign contributions.
Transforming leadership, Burns wrote later, was radically different; it
created “a relationship of mutual stimulation and elevation that converts
followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral agents.” A
transformational leader “looks for potential motives in followers, seeks
to satisfy higher needs, and engages the full person of the follower.”
Real transformational leadership was, Burns knew, rare, especially
in the thickets of the American political system, and as he studied
leaders and leadership, he came more and more to appreciate the role
of transactional leadership—day-to-day practical politics—in achieving
transformational change. The combination of lion and fox in one
person was no paradox or flaw but the essence of effective leadership.
And so his first subject, Franklin Roosevelt, coupled with his own
political experience and education, helped Burns hone a style and a point
of view that would become his trademark as a scholar. That was exactly
what was so unusual about all of his books. They were not just history,
not just narratives—they offered sharp political insight and analysis
grounded in ideas about leadership. Newsweek pronounced The Lion
and the Fox “‘A case study unmatched in American political writings.’”3
Roosevelt was Burns’ touchstone for presidential leadership, the
template he brought to his studies of both FDR’s great predecessors,
such as George Washington and his cousin Theodore Roosevelt, and
successors, presidents who Burns knew personally, studied, and influenced,
such as JFK and Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill
Clinton. Deadlock of Democracy in particular with its calls for assertive
presidential leadership, impressed Kennedy and Johnson. As Burns’
student, presidential historian Michael Beschloss remarked, “Both JFK
and LBJ read [Deadlock] closely and talked to him about what they
might do to break the gridlock on Capitol Hill. In important ways, it’s
a book that is current today.”
Leadership Studies
Jim Burns’ intensive study of presidents led him, in the 1970s, into the
study of leadership itself. At the time, that was a rather moribund
james macgregor burns	 479
enterprise, dominated by anecdotes and clichés about Great Men. With
his now classic 1978 book, Leadership, Burns re-founded leadership
studies. And although his book gave the new field intellectual direction,
Burns knew that to thrive, leadership studies also needed professional
infrastructure, including an association, some core texts and surveys,
academic standing, and a strong commitment from a publisher—so he
generated all of these. He was the co-founder (with Larraine Matusak
and Georgia Sorenson) of the International Leadership Association,
now with 2,600 members from 70 countries; he co-edited the
four-volume, award-winning Encyclopedia of Leadership (with George
Goethals and Georgia Sorenson); and he led a seminal study group on
leadership theory whose findings were published later in The Quest for
a General Theory of Leadership (2007) and Government by the
People,4 still a standard undergraduate text. He was a founding scholar
at both the Jepson School of Leadership at the University of Richmond
and the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership at the University
of Maryland.
The Scholar as Activist
Jim Burns, though, was never a prisoner of the ivory tower. He was
convinced that theory must be married to practice, for the benefit of
theory as well as of practice. Failed leaders, he thought, were those
who did not match ideas to means, who could not connect means to
ends. His scholarship and writing were deeply informed by his own
learning from the field; in fact, he typically described himself not as a
biographer or scholar but as a “student of leadership.”
His own political education began early, at the dinner table as a
teenager strenuously defending FDR’s agenda against his father’s family
with strong Republican moorings. His formal political training began
as a young protégée of Max Lerner, a radical writer who was his
teacher and mentor at Williams. Burns campaigned for FDR’s 1936
re-election in what was often hostile terrain in western Massachusetts,
riding through deserted main streets blaring appeals to re-elect the
president through a foghorn. After Williams, he secured a Washington
internship with a congressman that gave him a firsthand view of
American politics in all its glory and shame. A passionate Democrat, he
later served as party leader in Williamstown, as a reformer of the state
party and as a delegate to four national conventions.
Burns’ personal credo was always, “Be bold!” So, true to his
teachings, he took a leave of absence from Williams in 1958 and threw
his hat into the race for a western Massachusetts congressional seat in a
traditionally Republican district. He was propelled by both intellectual
480	 biographical memoirs
curiosity and a commitment to the revival of a region that had been
devastated by the loss of manufacturing jobs.
It was an intense campaign, but also fun, involving his young
family, full of unexpected ups and downs. He won a tough Democratic
primary but lost the general election to a Republican who would hold
on to the seat for decades.
Running for office was a transformational experience for Burns.
The exposure to grassroots party politics, with so many volunteers
working on his behalf, impressed him and gave him a vivid sense of the
mobilization power of political parties, even as exposure to bitter crosscurrents
within the Democratic Party tempered that optimism. He
experienced firsthand the underside of American politics—
McCarthyism and bigotry toward Catholics—and endured attacks as
an ivory tower elitist, an atheist, a communist. Out in the field, Burns
tested his theories against practice. The student of leadership gained a
deeper understanding of what practicing politicians—would-be
leaders—needed to surmount to achieve their ends.
Leadership for What?
In his last decade especially, Burns devoted himself with a passion to
that question, “Leadership for what?” One of the tests he had set for
leaders was dedication to the transforming values of life and liberty,
and equality and happiness. But billions of people struggled to secure
even the most basic of rights, the fundamentals of life—water and food
and shelter and health. As he met with world leaders concerned with
global poverty, he argued that the poor lacked not only material
resources but also the political resources to empower them to fight for
what they needed. They lacked, above all, leadership.
Burns realized that the dynamic between leaders and followers was
one of mutual empowerment. Leaders would empower followers by
motivating and organizing them into an effective force to achieve
shared goals. But leaders were also empowered by their followers, who
would in turn become leaders.
In one of his last books, titled Transforming Leadership: A New
Pursuit of Happiness (2003), Burns turned his theory about leaders
and followers into a rallying cry for activism:
In millennia past, the most potent act of the rulers of nations has
been the recruitment and deployment into battle of great armies of
their people. Can we, in coming decades, mobilize throughout the
world a new, militant, but peaceful army—tens of thousands of
leaders who would in turn recruit fresh leaders at the grass roots,
james macgregor burns	 481
in villages and neighborhoods, from among the poor themselves, to
fight and win a worldwide war against desperation?
James MacGregor Burns died quietly in his sleep at the home of his
longtime companion, Susan Dunn, on 15 July 2014. A few days later,
Jim Yung Kim, president of the World Bank Group, posted “Transformational
leadership: A Tribute to James MacGregor Burns.” He closed
with these words:
Can we virtually end extreme poverty? I believe it’s entirely
possible. We now need to foster much higher economic growth
rates, and many more evidence-based strategies for inclusive
economic growth. But we also need many more leaders to help
catalyze a global movement to end extreme poverty. I can think of
no greater calling for a leader than to follow Burns’ vision.5
Bye for now, Jim Burns, and thank you.
Elected 1971
Georgia Sorenson
Founder, James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership
Møller By Fellow, Churchill College, University of Cambridge
Author’s Note
The author wishes to thank Susan Dunn and Milt Djuric for their
review of an earlier draft. Parts of this piece are from “Theory and
Practice: James MacGregor Burns,” by Georgia Sorenson, in Leadership
and the Humanities (March 2015).
Endnotes
1.	 Savage, Sean J., JFK, LBJ, and the Democratic Party, SUNY Press, 2006.
2.	 Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/james-macgregor-burns-historian-
dies-at-95-108937.html#ixzz3FJrIYeVh
3.	 http://www.amazon.com/Roosevelt-The-Lion-Vol-1882-1940/dp/0156027623
4.	 Burns, J., Peltason, J., Cronin, T. et al., Government by the People, Prentice Hall,
1952.
5.	 “Transformational Leadership: A Tribute to James MacGregor Burns,” 23 July 2014.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140723194637-32702694-transformational-
leadership-a-tribute-to-james-macgregor-burns