Edmund Burke as painted by James Northcote
A Burkean event took place in New Haven not long ago when two distinguished leaders at Yale proposed to the Proprietors of the Grove Street Cemetery, before a standing-room-only crowd of townspeople, that to tear down the cemetery wall would “create an inviting and open atmosphere” for passersby.
The cemetery is the oldest municipally incorporated burial ground in the country, older than Père-Lachaise in Paris. Eli Whitney, Noah Webster, Roger Sherman, and Samuel F. B. Morse lie there along with African-American Civil War veterans. The entrance gate and wall erected in the 1840s is a unique expression of the neo-Egyptian architectural style of the time. A headstone on an empty gravesite salutes the memory of Glenn Miller, the trombonist and band leader whose plane disappeared over the English Channel during World War II; he had formed his 418th Army Air Force band at Yale.
The debate was civil and moderate in tone, but stark. It became a male versus female issue. The women of the town prevailed. Their argument was, in essence: “Who are we to do such a thing as against all those generations in the past, and those yet to be born?” It was a Burkean moment, although no one at the time seemed to recognize it as such.
For Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century Irish statesman who served in the British House of Commons, the hallmark of a sane society is reconciliation of the
