WARREN BURGER ON THE BOMB

Two margin notes in my collection of books from Warren Burger deal directly with the threat of nuclear war. One is found on page 115 of H.H. Overstreet, The Mature Mind (1949), at the end of a chapter titled "Mature Insights Lost on Immature Minds," which discusses the disjuncture between scientific capacity and moral capacity. The full page is below.


Here is a close-up of the note itself, which reads:


"Similarly Mans' physical growth, in physics, chemistry, mechanics, and related science has far outstripped his understanding - the collective maturity of Man is centuries, perhaps, behind his ability to control the forces he is capable of creating. Thus centuries of unceasing war is now capped by the H-Bomb that in the words of the 91st Psalm, 'wastes at noonday'

The arrow is pointing to text from Overstreet on the facing page (114) that reads: "the psychological growth of man must keep pace with his physical powers; every increase in power must be matched by an increase in understanding."

There are two kinds of writing in Overstreet: marks in ink, including a tight cursive script that appears in at least one other book in the collection; and the printed pencil script that I have reproduced in this post and in the post on Parrington, below. The cursive script matches known examples of Burger's handwriting.

Burger seems to have read Overstreet at least twice and made two series of marks in the text - pen and pencil marks sometimes appear on the same page. This is not surprising: throughout the margin notes he seems concerned with the general problem of moral and political development. This concern expresses itself (in at least two places) in criticisms of Democrats. More on that in a later post. But as befits a Republican of the pre- or at least non-Goldwater variety, his criticism is probably more anti-populist than anti-Democrat. For his doubts about the red-baiting tactics of McCarthy, see my first post on this collection, here.

Warren Burger was also an artist, as this web page shows (created by the special collections folks at the William and Mary Library, where the Burger papers are under seal until 2026). My collection has two sketches in them, one of which is a pencil sketch in the margin of H.R. Hayes, From Ape to Angel (1958).

The sketch is next to a passage on page viii that begins with the Garden of Eden myth and ends with a warning about nuclear annihilation: "By eating the apple, Adam was destined to become one of the angels. But the apple was not an elixir. It opened man's eyes and perhaps symbolized the dawn of consciousness, but the job of civilizing himself was his own problem. As we look at man's present plight, we see that if he is to become as one of the angels, he has a long way to go. If he fails to push on, he may soon find himself extinct with the protoapes from which he sprang."