William A. M. Burden

Burden was born on April 8, 1906 in Manhattan. He was the son of William Armistead Moale Burden (1877–1909),[2] and Florence Vanderbilt (née Twombly) (1881–1969).[3] He was the brother of Shirley Carter Burden (1908–1989), a prominent photographer.[4]

His paternal grandparents were I. Townsend Burden (1838–1913)[5][6][7] and Evelyn Byrd Moale (1847–1916),[8] the daughter of William Armistead Moale (1800–1880) of Baltimore, Maryland,[9] who was a direct descendant of the Carter and Byrd families of Virginia. His grandfather was an owner of Burden Iron Works, which was founded by his great-grandfather, Henry Burden (1791–1871).[10] He was also the maternal grandson of Florence Adele Vanderbilt Twombly, a granddaughter of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt,[11] and Hamilton McKown Twombly.[12]

Burden attended and graduated from Harvard College in 1927. He also attended special aviation courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[13]

Standing, left to right: Burden, then Special Aviation Assistant to the Secretary of Commerce, Willard E. Givens, and John W. Studebaker. Seated, left to right: Ralph A. Bard, Paul V. McNutt, and Robert P. Patterson, September 1942

In 1927, after his graduation from Harvard, he was hired as an aviation research analyst at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. From 1932 to 1938, he worked for Scudder, Stevens and Clark.[13] In 1935, while at Scudder, he was elected a director of the United Air Lines Transport Corporation.[14] In 1940, he was named to the board of trustees of Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co.[15]

During World War II, he was Special Assistant for Research and Development to the Secretary of the Air Force.[13] In 1947, after the War, he joined Smith, Barney & Co. as an aviation consultant.[16]

In 1949, he founded William A. M. Burden & Co., an investment company intended to pool and manage his families money.[17] The firm is considered a pioneer in the "family office" space and continues to this day, managing half a billion dollars as of 1998.[18] Unlike other Vanderbilt descendants, Burden "saw the fortune dissipating into smaller and smaller chunks and was determined to protect his own progeny."[18]

In 1959, he was nominated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower as U.S. Ambassador to Belgium.[19] He served in this role from 1959 until 1961.[13]

Burden served on the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City from 1943 until his death.[20] He was elected President of the Board in 1953, succeeding Nelson Rockefeller, who resigned to accept appointment as Under Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare.[21] Burden resigned as President in 1959, to become Ambassador,[22] and was succeeded by Blanchette Ferry Rockefeller, the wife of John D. Rockefeller III.[23] He resumed the presidency again afterwards from 1961 until 1965.[24][20][25] He donated works to be auctioned off for the Museum, including Paul Cézanne's Apples, in 1960.[26] He also served as a trustee of Columbia University, a member of the board of the Smithsonian Institution,[27] director of the Council on Foreign Relations, chairman of the Institute for Defense Analysis.[1]

Portrait of Joseph Roulin by Vincent van Gogh, donated to MoMa by Burden

On February 16, 1931,[30] he was married to Margaret Livingston Partridge (1909–1996), at Saint Thomas Church in Manhattan.[30] She was the daughter of William Ordway Partridge (1861–1930), a sculptor, and the niece of Bishop Sidney Catlin Partridge.[31] On her mother's side, she was the granddaughter of William H. Wetmore and the great-great-great-granddaughter of Chancellor Robert L. Livingston[31] Together, they were the parents of four sons:[29]

• William Armistead Moale Burden III (1931–1962),[32] a reporter for The Washington Post who was married to Leslie Lepington Hamilton (1932–1998), granddaughter of Bishop Franklin Hamilton, in 1951.[33]
• Robert Livingston Burden (1934–1974), who did not marry and was the head of the science department at Thomas Jefferson School in St. Louis.[34]
• Hamilton Twombly Burden (1937–2015),[35] who did not marry and who was an author.[36][37][38]
• Ordway Partridge Burden (b. 1944), who married Jean Elizabeth (née Poor) Lynch, the granddaughter of Walter E. Poor, founder of the Sylvania Electric Company, in 1991.[39][40]

Burden died on October 10, 1984.[13]

• The Struggle for Airways in Latin America (1943), Council on Foreign Relations.[46]
• Peggy and I: A Life Too Busy For a Dull Moment (1982) 345 pp.[47]

• William A. M. Burden at Find a Grave
• The Struggle for Airways in Latin America, by William Armistead Moale Burden, 1943.