William Armistead Moale Burden Jr. (April 8, 1906 – October 10, 1984) was an American banker, art collector, and philanthropist who served as U.S. Ambassador to Belgium under President Eisenhower.[1]
In 1949, he founded William A. M. Burden & Co., an investment company intended to pool and manage his family's 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 the 1940s, Burden and his wife commissioned Wallace K. Harrison, an architect who was involved in the design of Rockefeller Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and the United Nations Building in New York, as well as Isamu Noguchi, the artist,[28] to design a summer home for them in Maine.[29] The original 4,500 square-foot house, known as "Sea Change," was completed in 1947 and in the early 1980s, an indoor swimming pool was added bringing the home up to 6,500-square-feet.[29]
On February 16, 1931,[30] he was married to Margaret Livingston Partridge (1909–1996), at Saint Thomas Church in Manhattan.[30] She was a daughter of sculptor William Ordway Partridge (1861–1930) and a niece of Bishop Sidney Catlin Partridge.[31] On her mother's side, she was a granddaughter of William H. Wetmore and 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]
Hamilton Twombly Burden (1937–2015),[35] who was an author.[36][37][38]
Ordway Partridge Burden (b. 1944), who married Jean Elizabeth (née Poor) Lynch, a granddaughter of Walter E. Poor, founder of the Sylvania Electric Company, in 1991.[39][40]
In 1971, together with his mother and brother, he donated Burden Auditorium to Harvard Business School in honor of his father, William A. M. Burden Sr., who graduated from Harvard in 1900, and his son, William A. M. Burden III, who graduated from Harvard in 1953 and Harvard Business School in 1955, both of whom died young.[1][41] The hall was designed by Lincoln Center architect Philip Johnson.[41]
His granddaughter, Wendy Burden,[43] wrote a memoir entitled Dead End Gene Pool about her family,[44] including her grandfather William, who in the waning years of his life “had a bathroom and dressing room lined with two inches of foam to avoid bruising himself. Once, while visiting Paris, he had a private secretary in New York order seven new Mercedes-Benzes — one to be delivered within a few hours."[45]
After his death, in 1985 his widow donated "eleven masterworks" from his estate to the Museum of Modern Art.[20] Paintings included:[20]
^Magruder, Alexander Contee; Miller, Oliver; Brewer Jr., Nicholas; Stockett, John Shaaf; Brantly, William Theophilus; Perkins, William Henry; Tiffany, Herbert Thorndike; Coan, Malcolm J. (1917). Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Court of Appeals of Maryland. p. 553. Retrieved September 19, 2017.