Burgess, John William b.August 26, 1844; Cornersville, Tennessee d. January 13, 1931; Newport, Rhode Island
American political scientist. After studies in Germany, John William Burgess became professor at Columbia University and a major influence in the creation of political science as a graduate academic discipline in the United States.
Burgess grew up in Tennessee in a slaveholding but pro-Union family. In the Civil War he served with the Union as scout and quartermaster. After the war he studied at Amherst College, from which he graduated in 1867. He studied law with a law firm in nearby Springfield, Massachusetts, and was admitted to the bar in 1869. He did not practice but joined the faculty of Knox College. From 1871 to 1873 Burgess studied law, history, and political science at the universities of Gottingen, Leipzig and Berlin, where he had Johann Gustav Droysen, Theodore Mommsen, Heinrich von Tre- itschke, Rudolf von Gneist, and other leading scholars of the day as teachers. A companion in his study trip was Elihu Root, later U.S. secretary of state. Upon his return to the United States in 1873, Burgess taught history and political science at Amherst until 1876, when he joined the faculty at Columbia University. In 1880, together with Nicholas Murray Butler, Burgess established the School of Political Science at Columbia University, which replicated German educational models. The school soon commenced publishing the Political Science Quarterly. In 1890 Burgess published his most important academic work, Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law, and became dean of the Faculty of Political Science in 1890. He remained in that position until his retirement in 1912.
Burgess’s relationship with Germany and with German culture can be seen as part of his mission in life. During the Civil War, Burgess vowed to himself that he “would devote [his] life to teaching men how to live by reason and compromise instead of by bloodshed and destruction” (Reminiscences 1934, 29).
He sought to acquire in German universities “the education which would fit [him] for the life work which [he] had chosen for himself ” (Reminiscences 1934, 86). In 1906 Burgess became the first Roosevelt Professor of American History and Institutions at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. When World War I broke out, Burgess wrote several newspaper articles and two books in which, as he later stated, he sought to express the idea “that as a neutral nation, we ought to understand how the parties involved viewed the war, and thus maintain our neutrality intelligently” (New York Times, December 17, 1918, p. 2). For his empathetic treatment of the German position, Burgess endured sharp criticism. When the United States entered the war, the secretary of war banned Burgess’s two war books. After the war, Burgess was repeatedly among the first named in Senate hearings as a source of pro-German sentiment.James R. Maxeiner
See also Gottingen, University of; World War I
References and Further Reading
Burgess, John W. Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law. 2 vols. Boston: Ginn, 1890-1891.
------. Reminiscences of an American Scholar: The Beginnings of Columbia University, with a Forward by Nicholas Murray Butler. New York: Columbia University Press, 1934.
Farr, James. “Burgess, John William.” American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 3:940-941.