Walter Dean Burnham: An American Clockmaker

NORTEAMÉRICA, Año 12, número 2, julio-diciembre de 2017 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.20999//nam.2017.b009 Walter Dean Burnham: An American Clockmaker Jesus Velasco* The eminent writer and thinker Elias Canetti published The Secret Heart of the Clock in 1985. His book of aphorisms suggested to me the image of a curious antiquarian clockmaker who finds an old but functional clock that he carefully takes apart. After analyzing the different components of the timepiece, the clockmaker decides to reassemble the device. When he finishes, the clock is in a good working order, ticking and elegant, but different. Dean Burnham has done something similar in his long career. Throughout his decades in academia, Professor Burnham has immersed himself in the past, searching for facts, for data, which he has assembled according to his own viewpoint and theoretical framework. The raw facts were there even before Dean was acquainted with them, but they needed a political scientist like him to give them life and meaning, to construct a new explanatory narrative. In doing exactly that, Dean reconstructed the United States’ past, creating a new vision, a new history –in short, a new timepiece. Walter Dean Burnham has been an U.S. American clockmaker. The purpose of this article is to study the life, work, and influences of this prominent political scientist. My goal is threefold. The first is to analyze Professor Burnham’s work, concentrating on two aspects: realignment theory and his contribution to the field of U.S. American political development ([u.s.]apd). The second is to show how the kind of macro analysis advanced by Burnham has essentially “Gone with the Wind.” The new trend of [u.s.]apd, with its emphasis on the micro-foundation of politics, has changed the discipline to become more scientific but less political. The third goal is to reconsider how Dean’s work is important for exploring and understanding the beginnings of [u.s.]apd. In fact, [u.s.]apd specialists use the main features of his work to this day. * Jesus Velasco holds the Joe and Teresa Long Endowed Chair in Social Sciences, Tarleton State University. . 215 Jesus Velasco norteamérica To achieve these goals, this article will be divided into three main sections. First, I will explore Walter Dean Burnham as a young boy interested in politics and collecting data, or, as Burnham has called it, a “hobby.” In the second section, I will talk about Dean’s contributions to political science. And finally, I will present some concluding remarks. Discovering Politics, Searching for Data “Three days I am a political scientist, three days an historian, and on the remaining day, I do not know who I am,” Professor Burnham told Nicole Mellow and me in the summer of 2002 (Mellow and Velasco, 2002). Dean is a scholar whose love of history, politics, and data is both time-honored and widely renowned. But Burnham is also a curious intellectual, a person interested in geography, geology, meteorology, and evolutionary biology, disciplines not commonly associated with the curiosities and work of political scientists. Burnham is above all an intellectual; he enjoys mental activities and works constantly with his intellect. He is a true believer in the convergence of knowledge that one can find in other disciplines and creating theoretical frameworks and ideas to explain political phenomena. In this regard, he is following not only a deep tradition in political science –the applications of law, psychology, or economics to the study of politics– but also of the hard sciences. Burnham’s passion for interdisciplinary analysis has helped him develop his work. Dean grew up in Pittsburgh in a middle-class Republican family and in the midst of acute world disorder. At the age of ten, he was already interested in politics, collecting buttons and attending meetings. At fourteen, he joined a crowd supporting the election of Dewey over Roosevelt. In those days, he expressed interest in historical data, and in particular, the question of where votes came from. This is how, in his own manner, during his adolescence he discovered the “clock.” Professor Burnham, like any other human being, was shaped by his historical time. He was deeply impressed and politicized by three key historical events: the Great Depression; World War II, in particular the Nazi invasion of Norway; and the Korean War. Dean’s mother was the granddaughter of a Norwegian immigrant. His mother maintained strong ties with her relatives in Europe. When the Nazis swept into Norway in 1940, the entire family was greatly troubled. “You do not need to be rocket scientist,” Dean said, “to figure out that my parents were very strongly in favor of the Allied cause” (Mellow and Velasco, 2002). In his own words, the Nazi invasion of Norway “was the first event that, as it were, propelled me out of the neighborhood and the city and into awareness of a much larger world outside” 216 (DOI: http://dx.doi.org /10.20999//nam.2017.b009) Walter Dean Burnham special contribution (Burnham, 1982: 5). This historical event significantly influenced his concern with history and comparative analysis. Dean decided to study at his father’s alma mater, Johns Hopkins University. From the beginning of college, he showed an inclination for the social sciences. “I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do [at Hopkins],” Burnham recalled, “but I knew that it would be something related to politics and history. I basically majored in both” (Velasco, 2012g). At the time that he entered Hopkins, he was already a deeply politicized teenager. As an undergraduate, Malcolm Moos, a scholar interested in political parties, significantly influenced him. Moos helped Dean get a grant to write Presidential Ballots and alerted him of the relevance of studying the history of the Supreme Court. Burnham became fascinated with constitutional law and constitutional history and very aware of the interplay of U.S. American political institutions. When Professor Burnham was in his second year at Hopkins, he expressed a passion for data. “I like to speculate,” he recalled. “I like to theorize as much as I can, but also I like to spend a lot of time saving data” (Velasco, 2012g). Thus, when he was a sophomore, he found another chance to express his personal propensity for datagathering and historical analysis. During those years, Dean was interested in election returns, and he liked to spend time looking for books in the library. In the Hopkins library, he found Edgar Eugene Robinson’s Presidential Vote 1896-1932 (1934). This is a book of data, a collection of county-level presidential election returns for the period indicated in the title. Robinson’s book, recalls Dean, “stimulated me to launch my first data-retrieval project: Why not take the story back to 1836, the first election in which (except for South Carolina from 1836 to 1860) full national-wide reporting of country-level presidential data exists, and extend the series forward (...truncated)