Robert Louis Burns (January 12, 1876 – March 17, 1955) was an American politician, attorney, and businessman who served as a member of the Los Angeles school board from 1923 to 1929 and the Los Angeles City Council from 1929 to 1945. At the time of his death in 1955, he was described as a local "elder statesman." Early life Burns was born January 12, 1876, in Knoxville, Iowa, the son of William E. Burns of Erie, Pennsylvania, and Dulcina Elizabeth French of Indiana. He had three brothers. He graduated from high school in Hutchinson, Kansas. Career He later became a lawyer and worked as the business manager of The Hutchinson News. He also engaged in coal mining and the telephone business. He and a brother began a flour mill that grew into the Consolidated Flour Mills of Kansas, His company was the first in the nation to introduce the eight-hour day for mill employees. In 1916, he retired and moved to Los Angeles, where he joined the Los Angeles Country Club. Burns was a Presbyterian and a Republican. Politics Kansas Burns was on the school board in Hutchinson, Kansas, for five years. Los Angeles Burns first ran for election to the Los Angeles Board of Education in May 1923, when he came in thirteenth in a field of twenty, a sufficiently high result to be nominated for election to the seven-member board. In the final vote in June, he was third and was elected. He was reelected in 1925 and 1927 but announced in January 1929 that he would run for the City Council. As a school board member, he attended the unveiling of a portrait of the late school superintendent Susan Miller Dorsey in 1929 and cast one of the favorable votes the same year to purchase the surplus property of the University of California, Los Angeles campus on Vermont Avenue to be used by Los Angeles City College. City Council See also List of Los Angeles municipal election returns, 1929–43 Burns was first elected to represent the 4th District on the City Council in 1929, was repeatedly reelected for sixteen years, and for half of that time was the council president, serving as acting mayor when the mayor himself was out of the state. Known as an opponent of "radicals and subversives," Burns was opposed in his candidacy in 1935 by James A. Farley, postmaster-general of the