But they defined it in a variety of ways-for example, the liberty to have slaves and the liberty to be free of slavery. They were willing to fight and die for it.
Liberty was an incredibly evocative term to those early Americans. What is the confusion of values you’re referring to? When you get back to the founders in reality, they look just as great as they do in mythology. And above all, it’s a book about leadership, especially in that early period that I call the sunburst of leadership. The book is about values-what this country is all about. It’s for the intelligent lay audience that feels it has forgotten a lot of American history and would like to be reminded of important aspects of it in a human, narrative form, in a book that has some of the breadth of a textbook but isn’t one.ĭo you think that audience is out there? At AMERICAN HERITAGE we live by the faith that it is. So he is, in a sense, “returning” to historianship-and, as he explains, happily so.įor whom did you write The Vineyard of Liberty? This is Burns’s first formal book devoted entirely to history, but he notes that his “first nonacademic job” was as a combat historian in the Pacific in World War II. He is awaiting publication of The Vineyard of Liberty, the first of three volumes that he is writing under the general title of “The American Experiment.” The first volume covers the years from 1787 to 1860 the next will bring the story down to 1932, he now thinks and the final one will go on from there.
He has managed also to write many articles on matters of statecraft, to be coauthor of a textbook on American government, and to win a term as president of the American Political Science Association.īut it is history that concerns him as we talk on the porch of his farmhouse on the east slope of the Taconic Range, just inside the border of his native Massachusetts. Its sequel, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, took the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1971. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox won acclaim when published in 1956. Since 1949 he has written eight widely known books on the men and the forces that shape American government. He is also a professor of political science at Williams College, from which he was graduated in 1939. James MacGregor Burns describes himself as a “part-time politician.” He has earned the title by serving as a delegate to four Democratic National Conventions, by membership on two commissions to revise Democratic party charters, and by a run for Congress in 1958.
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