Albert
Edward Burke was born in New York on May 30, 1919. The son
of Russian immigrants, his father was a civil engineer who traveled
the world with his family during the 1930s. As a result,
Burke became fluent in speaking Russian and several other languages at a
young age.
By 1944,
he had attended Northwestern and served in the Navy. Soon
after, Dr. Burke married his wife Ruth a research scientist at Yale,
they shortened their name from "Burkenbilt" to
"Burke", he got his B.A. & M.A. in Earth Science at UCLA and PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. From 1949 to 1957 he was Director of Graduate Studies at Yale University.
In 1950 his first programs went on the air at a tiny station in New
Haven, titled "This is Your World". He wanted
to "make the living room his classroom", where he
could teach his Yale courses during the dinner hour so entire
families could listen and learn together. It was in this way that Dr.
Burke helped form programs for "Public Service" television,
known today as Educational Television. He was also a frequent guest on
Mike Douglas' show and Meet the Press and was nominated for an Emmy in 1961.Dr. Burke
passed away in January 1999.
While Dr. Burke is best known for his many years on television, his most lasting legacy came with the publication of his book Enough Good Men. The book stands as a written testament to the many observations and issues he was able to connect and in so doing provide a more complete understanding of the world around us to his audience.
The Burke Center is pleased to provide for you a free download
of the digital version of Dr. Burke's book, Enough Good Men: A Way of Thinking, originally published on November 19,1962. The visionary
concepts in it, while 48 years old and seemingly dated, are as fresh today in
political, scientific and environmental happenings as they were when the book
first appeared. Below is a sampler from it by which you can
judge for yourself on the relevance of what he said then that is still
applicable to the situation of the world today. More than that, while we have
attempted below to “categorize” what he has said, his uncanny ability to
connect many of the divergent issues to each other transcends categorization
and those connections add a whole new dimension. The insights are timeless and
continue to offer sound guidance for the many needed solutions that still
evade us.
Individual Freedom
We have an American creed. It consists of the things
we have believed as we made ourselves one of history's great nations. The
American creed encompasses one of the widest ranges of faiths and beliefs in history. We have had freedom, under
law, to think freely, to question freely, to investigate freely, and to act
freely. But today the creed that made us great is under fire by men in government,
men in business, men in labor, and even men in the church. They would like to
see our range of freedom narrowed down to a set of faiths and beliefs approved
by them. They want a safer, more manageable set of faiths and beliefs,
something less risky, less challenging, than the old...This attitude is not
just un-American; it is anti-American. p.45.
In our
time, there is as great a need as there ever was for brave men who know that it
takes more than lip service to our traditions in Memorial Day and Veterans' Day
speeches to make us what the last line of our national anthem says we are:
"the land of the free and the home of the brave." It takes brave
men to fight those who fear differences in faith and belief, here at home and
in the rest of the world. It takes brave men who know that if we succeed in
wiping out those differences; if we succeed in keeping Americans from thinking
about "isms" and from having "strong personal views"; if we
succeed in wiping out all radicals, all odd-balls, all the troublemakers who
make history, then we will destroy our greatest strength. And we will do
exactly that if we fail to recognize that it was the odd-balls, the
troublemakers, and the radicals (whatever that word means) who made it possible
for us to enjoy a greater degree of human dignity than most of the world has
known. p. 47.
Responsibility
Today's much larger American population
has less of that "elbowroom," on farmlands, in mines, in good water,
good air, or in any natural resource. Today's American has less, and poorer quality
resources to work and live with. We are no longer free to do as we please with
them…This resentment has led to a new parlor game in this country during the
last thirty years, a dangerous game of name-calling called "creeping
socialism." It is played by too many Americans today who simplify things
too much. Often they know little or nothing about the kind of American history
made by irresponsible men who forced the government into what were then our
private affairs. That record clearly shows what happens when individual Americans
misuse their private affairs by making them public problems. When that point is
reached, the government always steps in.
Americans who play this dangerous new game of "creeping socialism"
see that government, their government, as one of the greatest dangers to our
future as a free people. In doing so they misuse the word "socialism"
and they misread their own history.
The problem has never been "creeping socialism" in our
American government. It has always been creeping irresponsibility among too many
Americans. pp. 190-191.
It is easy to join a national movement to save the
world from communism, or whatever. It is the harder, however (because it is
more demanding), to join with the people of our community in an effort to save
through our schools only a small part of the world in which our children will
live. p.178
On Business
America's businessmen once believed that
there was nothing like competition between people in a free market to produce
the best possible product. The stiffer the competition, they said, the better the
product. This nation once believed, too, that there was nothing like
competition between ideas in a free country to produce the best thinkers. In
economics, and in politics, those old principles have weakened, and that
Congressional committee report, and the oil company's advice (and they are only
a few of many), show how far the United States has traveled since the days of
the Founding Fathers. pp. 46-47.
Human Rights
They [our
Founders] had a strange idea for their time. It was that every man and
woman had a God-given free will, and a God-given responsibility to use it to
govern himself, and to make lives of dignity possible for all men. Men and
women could not use that free will responsibly as long as they accepted
unquestioningly the order of things generally approved. It was the obligation
of all free men to question everything, those men said, in order to know. It
was the obligation of all free men to disagree with evil, to dissent against
ignorance, against bigotry, and poverty, and greed, and stupidity. Dissent,
these men said—and improve things. p. 112.
The Environment
We know how to control air and water pollution. Ten
billion dollars spent on new sewage disposal plants in places like St. Joseph,
Missouri, would remove pollution from nearly all the nation's water. The same
amount would solve our air pollution problems. The problem is not money. It is
a problem of education, education to inform Americans about the close tie that
has always existed between a wide margin of resources and freedom. Reduce that
margin of resources, reduce the quality of those resources, and you reduce what
Americans have always meant by the word "freedom. p. 202.
Factories, home heating units, incinerators, and
other fires will add thousands of additional tons of
debris every day. About a thousand tons of the total
are made up of hydrocarbons like benzopyrene. Time after time that substance
has triggered wild cells—cancer cells —in laboratory animals. That garbage in
the air has given cities around the world sewers in their skies. p.195.
Resources
…another important order, a directive ordering … a
machine to change sunlight into usable energy. If successful, it will be a
completely different kind of sunpowered generator from what has been worked out
anywhere on earth. If this order is carried out, it means the Russians will
have perfected a source of cheap power wherever there is sunlight. This
development alone can change the world's industry, shaking the world's politics
and economics to their roots. p. 88.
The point is that in today's world, as never before
in history, whoever controls the world's mineral resources can control the
world. That point becomes significant in light of the fact that none
of the western powers has, inside its own
territories, the minerals and metals it needs to be strong in war or peace.
Remember Suez, and what cutting off just one important raw material, oil, did
to every European economy? That can be repeated indefinitely by means short of
war, such as political and economic influence in the affairs of the countries
exporting raw materials. p. 130.
Greek resources, Plato told his people, were gone.
Timber had been cut down, but not replaced. The soil was blown or washed away
from farms and pasture lands. The mines were worked out. About twenty-three
hundred years later President Kennedy sent a special message to the Congress of
the United States which was a modem version of that warning to the ancient
Greeks. "Our entire society rests upon, is dependent upon, our water, our
land, our forests and our minerals," Mr. Kennedy told the people.
"How we use these resources influences our
health, our security, economy, and well-being."
… Our minerals are being used up at increasing
rates. p. 185.