In Memoriam: Milton C. Cummings, Jr.
By Richard S. Katz

(PS: Political Science & Politics, January, 2008; 41, 1; ProQuest Education Journals. pp 224-225.)

Our colleague and dear friend, Milton C. Cummings, Jr., died on August 10, 2007, at the New Jersey home of one of his sons, ultimately losing a 12 year battle with cancer. He was 74 years old. He is survived by sons Christopher R. Cummings of Kentfield, CA, and Jonathan B. Cummings of New Vernon, NJ; by his daughter Susan S. Cummings of London; and by nine grandchildren.

Although a child of the East Coast—he was born in New Haven, lived for several years in Brockport, New York, and then moved with his parents to the Washington, D.C., area—Milt spent many summers on his relatives’ farm in Kansas, and remained sensitive to the great variety of American experiences throughout both his professional and his private life. Milt was an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, from which he graduated with Highest Honors in 1954 and to which he often returned as an outside reader for senior theses. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford where he studied with Herbert Nicholas and David Butler. On his return to the United States in 1956, he entered the graduate program at Harvard University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1960 under the supervision of V. O. Key, Jr.

Milt Cummings had a distinguished career as a political scientist that spanned more than 45 years, starting with his appointment as a research assistant at The Brookings Institution in 1959, and continuing past his retirement from Johns Hopkins and appointment as professor emeritus, until just a few months before his death. He left Brookings in 1965, having become a senior staff member the year before, to join the faculty at The Johns Hopkins University as an associate professor. He was promoted to full professor in 1968, and during the next 36 years served at various times as undergraduate coordinator, graduate director, and department chair. He served on many professional committees, including as a member of the Council of the American Political Science Association from 1979 to 1981.

Although he already had two coauthored books to his credit (both with social psychologist Franklin Pierce Kilpatrick and another rising star in political science, M. Kent Jennings), Milt “hit the big time” in 1966 with the publication of Congressmen and the Electorate: Elections for the U.S. House and the President, 1920–1964 (a substantial expansion and revision of his doctoral dissertation that had only gone through 1956, in which he documented the declining hold of the Democratic party on the once “solid south”) and Key’s The Responsible Electorate: Rationality in Presidential Voting, 1936–1960 (which Milt completed from Key’s notes after V.O.’s death). These were followed in 1971 by the first edition of Democracy Under Pressure: An Introduction to the American Political System—coauthored with David Wise and now in its tenth edition, with an analysis of the 2006 congressional election that Milt wrote in between radiation treatments. From 1962 through 1976, he worked as an advisor on NBC News’ coverage of congressional elections.

In the mid-1970s the focus of Milt’s research began to move away from electoral politics and toward the study of cultural policy. Beginning with a 1976 article in Policy Studies Journal, and building on work that he had started somewhat earlier in sociology and economics, Milt was instrumental in developing cultural policy as a subfield of political science. Originally focusing on cultural policy in the United States, working on The Patron State: Government and the Arts in Europe, North America, and Japan (in which project I was privileged to be Milt’s collaborator) returned him to the world of comparative politics. (In 1955, Milt had won the Oxford University Wylie Prize for an essay on Anglo-American relations.) While in the grand scheme of things perhaps not the most important work he did, connecting as it did to a personal love of the arts, this work brought Milt great satisfaction and joy. He was invited to teach arts policy as a visiting professor of political science at the University of Madrid in 1994, to take part in a White House Conference on Cultural Diplomacy in 2000, and to participate in a program and conference in Paris organized by the French-American Foundation and the French Ministry of Culture in 2003. As one of his colleagues put it, “When many of us were beginning assistant professors, Milt had the stature to give our work instant credibility. His intellectual work in this area and mentoring provided an invaluable contribution to the careers of many of us. Moreover, his sense of humor, love of the opera, and constant acts of kindness will be long remembered by many of us.”

As dedicated as he was to scholarship, Milt’s dedication to his students was legendary. Having started teaching at Hopkins in 1965, he did not miss a class until 1995—an event noted by no less a figure than Baltimore icon, Oriole’s “iron man” Cal Ripkin, Jr. His classes were always over subscribed. One of his colleagues (me) sometimes suggested that the department should find a second hand church pew or railway waiting room bench for the students who regularly queued up for his office hours—which always lasted well beyond their posted end. To quote just a few of the tributes from his former students: “His depth of character and devotion to all of us go without saying, and well beyond any words I could write”; “Dr. Cummings, or Uncle Miltie, as people often called him, was not only my favorite professor and a good friend, he was also a true inspiration and the main reason I chose to go to graduate school studying political science”; “it is probably staggering to know how many people he touched. He truly was a great man: I am better for having known him.” Temperamentally unable to turn students away, or to cut them short, Milt was noted for having a string of “hidey-holes” where he could prepare for his classes and work on letters of recommendation. He won divisional teaching awards in 1983 and 2002, and a university award for excellence in faculty advising in 1994.

Milt had an amazing memory for statistics, which (as with many experts on American elections) extended to baseball. The last social outing we shared was a trip to a Washington Nationals game; he had some difficulty climbing to our seats in the upper deck, but none at all in recalling batting averages not just from the previous Nationals season, but from many seasons of following the Orioles and from the old Washington Senators as well.

While scrupulously objective in his teaching and in his academic writings, Milt was a fiercely loyal FDR  Democrat, who in his private conversations always referred to the Democrats as “we” rather than as “they.” Although sometimes challenged by events, his faith in the ultimate wisdom of the people remained as unshakable as his commitment to social justice.

As long time friend Michael Pinto Duschinsky observed in an obituary in the The Times ( London), Milt had the outward appearance of a member of the Washington establishment. He won research grants from all the major foundations; he was a member of Washington’s Cosmos Club; in 1994 he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by the State University if New York at Plattsburgh. As the rest of us became ever more casual in our dress, Milt continued to meet his classes in jacket and tie. Always ready to see the best in people, and always optimistic in facing any challenge, including that of his long and wearing illness, Milt Cummings was a true gentleman and a truly gentle man.

Richard S. Katz
The Johns Hopkins University

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