Henry Steele Commager

Henry Steele Commager (October 25, 1902 – March 2, 1998) was an American historian who helped define Modern liberalism in the United States for two generations through his forty books and 700 essays and reviews.^[1] His principal scholarly works were his 1936 biography of Theodore Parker; his intellectual history The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880's (1950), which focuses on the evolution of liberalism in the American political mind from the 1880s to the 1940s; and his intellectual history Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (1977). In addition, he edited one of the most influential compilations of American historical documents, Documents of American History, which went through ten editions between 1938 and 1988 (the tenth, and last, coedited with Commager's former student Milton Cantor.)

He won attention as one of the most active and prolific liberal intellectuals of his time, and he based his activism in support of the causes he advocated. In the 1940s and 1950s he was notable for his campaigns against the use of government power against leftist groups known as McCarthyism. With his Columbia University colleague Allan Nevins, Commager helped to organize academic support for Adlai E. Stevenson and John F. Kennedy. Later in his career, he opposed the war in Vietnam, and was an articulate and energetic critic of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, and of what he charged were their abuses of presidential power.

Career

Commager, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, worked his way through the University of Chicago, earning the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees by the time he was twenty-eight. His mentors at Chicago included the colonial American historian Marcus W. Jernegan and the constitutional historian Andrew C. McLaughlin. He taught at New York University from 1930 to 1936, Columbia University (from 1936 to 1956), and Amherst College in Massachusetts from 1956 to 1992. He retired in 1992 from the John Woodruff Simpson Lectureship.

Commager insisted, and taught generations of his students, that historians must write not only for one another but for a wider audience. Commager once said about teaching, "What every college must do is hold up before the young the spectacle of greatness."

Commager married author Evan Alexa Carroll (b. Feb 4, 1904, d. Mar 28 1968) of Bennettsville, South Carolina on July 3, 1928; the couple had three children, Henry Steele Commager Jr., known as Steele Commager, who became an eminent classicist at Columbia University and wrote the leading book on the Roman poet Horace; Elizabeth Carroll Commager; and Nellie Thomas McCall Commager (now Nell Lasch), wife of the historian Christopher Lasch. On July 14, 1979, he married his second wife, the former Mary Powlesland, a professor in Latin American studies, in Linton, England. With her he lived out the rest of his days. Commager died of pneumonia at the age of ninety-five on March 2, 1998.

Commager originally studied Danish history, and wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the Danish philosophe Johann Friedrich Struensee, a major reformer during the Enlightenment. Under the influence of his mentor at Chicago, the constitutional historian Andrew C. McLaughlin, Commager shifted his research and teaching interests to American history.

Commager's first monograph was the 1936 biography, Theodore Parker: Yankee Crusader, a life of the Unitarian minister, Transcendentalist, reformer, and abolitionist Theodore Parker; it was reissued in 1960, along with a volume edited by Commager collecting the best of Parker's voluminous writings. His most characteristic books were his 1950 monograph The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Character Thought since the 1880s; and his 1977 study Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment. As these books suggest, he was principally an intellectual and cultural historian, deeply influenced by the literary historian Vernon L. Parrington, but he also worked in the fields of constitutional and political history. His work on this subject includes his controversial 1943 series of lectures, Majority Rule and Minority Rights, which argued for a sharply curtailed scope for judicial review, based on the history of the U.S. Supreme Court's uses of judicial review to strike down economic regulatory legislation in the first decades of the twentieth century. Later, Commager came to embrace the vigorous use of judicial review to protect racial and religious minorities from discrimination and to safeguard individual liberties as protected by the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment.

Textbooks and editing

Commager was coauthor, with Samuel Eliot Morison, of the widely-used history text The Growth of the American Republic (1930; 1937; 1942; 1950, 1962; 1969; 7th ed., with William E. Leuchtenburg, 1980; abridged editions in 1980 and 1983 under the title Concise History of the American Republic). His anthology, Documents of American History (1938), reaching its tenth edition (coedited with his former student Milton Cantor) in 1988, half a century after its first appearance, remains a standard collection work of primary sources. His two documentary histories, The Blue and the Gray and The Spirit of Seventy-Six (the latter co edited with his longtime friend and Columbia colleague Richard B. Morris), are comprehensive collections of primary sources on the Civil War and the American Revolution as seen by participants.

With his Columbia colleague Richard B. Morris, he co-edited the highly influential New American Nation Series, a multi-volume collaborative history of the United States under whose aegis appeared many significant and prize-winning works of historical scholarship. (This series was a successor to the American Nation series planned and edited at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Harvard historian Albert Bushnell Hart.)

At Columbia, Commager mentored a series of distinguished historians who earned their Ph.D. degrees under his tutelage, including Harold Hyman, Leonard W. Levy, and William E. Leuchtenburg. They joined together in 1967 to present him with a festschrift, or commemorative collection of essays, dedicated to him, titled Freedom and Reform (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). When he moved to Amherst, an elite undergraduate college, he no longer mentored Ph.D. candidates.

Liberalism

Commager felt a duty as a professional historian to reach out to his fellow citizens. He believed that an educated public that understands American history would support liberal programs, especially internationalism and the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He downplayed the tedium of scholarly analysis in favor of sweeping interpretations of grand historical events, while at the same time providing easy access to primary sources so that people could study history for themselves. Commager was representative of a whole generation of like-minded historians who were widely read by the general public, including Samuel Eliot Morison, Allan Nevins, Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and C. Vann Woodward.^[2] Commager's biographer Neil Jumonville has argued that this style of influential public history has been lost in the 21st century because political correctness has rejected Commager's open marketplace of tough ideas. Jumonville says history now comprises abstruse deconstruction by experts, with statistics instead of stories, and is now comprehensible only to the initiated, while ethnocentrism rules in place of common identity.^[3]

Commager was a liberal interpreter of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, which he understood as creating a powerful general government that at the same time recognized a wide spectrum of individual rights and liberties. Commager opposed McCarthyism in the 1940s and 1950s, the war in Vietnam (on constitutional grounds), and what he saw as the rampant illegalities and unconstitutionalities perpetrated by the administrations of Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan. One favorite cause was his campaign to point out that, because the budget of the Central Intelligence Agency is classified, it violates the requirement of Article One of the Constitution that no moneys can be spent by the federal government except those specifically appropriated by Congress.

Essays

Commager wrote hundreds of essays and opinion pieces on history or presenting a historical perspective on current issues for popular magazines and newspapers. He collected many of the best of these articles and essays in such books as Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent; The Search for a Usable Past and Other Essays in Historiography; Freedom and Order: A Commentary on the American Political Scene; The Commonwealth of Learning; The Defeat of America: War, Presidential Power and the National Character; and Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment. He often was interviewed on television news programs and public-affairs documentaries to provide historical perspective on such events as the Apollo XI moon landing and the Watergate crisis.

Civil rights

While Commager was not deeply concerned with race in the early part of his career, he eventually became an advocate for civil rights for African-Americans, as he already was for other groups. In 1949 he fought to allow the African-American historian John Hope Franklin to present a paper at the Southern Historical Association and agreed to introduce him to the group. In 1953 the NAACP Legal Defense Fund asked Commager for advice for their argument before the Supreme Court for the case of Brown vs Board of Education, but at the time he was not persuaded that this litigation would succeed on historical grounds, and so advised the lawyers.

Criticism

Commager and his co-author Samuel Eliot Morison received vigorous criticism from African American intellectuals and other scholars for their very popular textbook The Growth of the American Republic, first published in 1930. (Although Morison was totally responsible for the textbook's controversial section on slavery and references to the slave as "Sambo." Commager was the junior member of the writing team when the book was first published, Commager has not been spared from charges of racism in this matter.) [1] The textbook was attacked for its favorable depiction of slavery in America and of African American life after emancipation and during Reconstruction. The original editions of the textbook echoed the thesis of American Negro Slavery (1918) by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. It relied on the one-sided personal records of slave-owners and portrayed slavery as a mainly benign institution. As the historian Herbert Gutman said, this scholarship focused on the question: What did slavery do for the slave? Its answer was that slavery lifted the slaves out of the barbarism of Africa, Christianized them, protected them, and generally benefited them.^[4] Criticism of the textbook was begun in 1944 by the NAACP; by 1950, under pressure from students and younger colleagues, Morison, while denying any racist intent (He noted that his daughter had been married to Joel Elias Spingarn, the former President National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)),reluctantly agreed to most of the demanded changes. Morison refused, however, to remove repeated references to the anti-abolitionist caricature of "Sambo", which he claimed were vital in understanding the racist nature of American culture in the late 19th and early 20th century, an era when even the most enlightened progressive thinkers routinely explained many aspects of human behavior as being a result of innate racial or ethnic characteristics.^[5] August A. Meier, a young professor at a black southern college, Tougaloo College, corresponded with Morison and Commager during this period of time in an effort to get them to change their textbook and reported that Morison "just didn't get it" and didn't understand the negative effects the Sambo stereotype was having on young impressionable students. Meier, on the other hand, found that Commager, although at first woefully unaware of black history, was open-minded on the subject and willing to learn and change. Morison did not agree to remove Sambo until the next edition, which appeared in 1962.^[6]

Selected publications

• The Growth of the American Republic (with Samuel Eliot Morison, New York: Oxford University Press, 1930 [as Oxford History of the United States]; 7th ed., 1980.. Revised and abridged edition with Samuel Eliot Morison and William E. Leuchtenburg published by Oxford University Press in 1980 as A Concise History of the American Republic, rev. 1983.
• Documents of American History (1934 and later editions through 1988)
• Theodore Parker: Yankee Crusader (1936) online edition
• Readings in American History (with Allan Nevins, 1939)
• Majority Rule and Minority Rights (1943)
• The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880s (1950)
• Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent (1954) online edition
• The Search for a Usable Past and Other Essays in Historiography (1965)
• Freedom and Order: A Commentary on the American Political Scene (1966)
• The Defeat of America: War, Presidential Power, and the National Character (1974)
• Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment (1976)
• The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press / Doubleday, 1977, and later reprintings.)
• Commager on Tocqueville (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993)

References

1. ^ Neil Jumonville, Henry Steele Commager: midcentury liberalism and the history of the present (1999)
2. ^ Neil Jumonville, Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present (1999)
3. ^ Andy Lindstrom, "Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998): An American Mind in the American Century" Research in Review (Fall 1999) online
4. ^ "web.gc.cuny.edu/ashp/doing/doinghistoriography.html". http://web.gc.cuny.edu/ashp/doing/doinghistoriography.html. 
5. ^ Gossett, Thomas F.; Race: The History of an Idea in America. http://books.google.com/books?id=WUucYTW6ug0C&pg=PP1&dq=Race:+the+history+of+an+idea+in+America#v=onepage&q=&f=false. 
6. ^ Jumonville, Commager p. 147

Bibliography

• Neil Jumonville, Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999) online edition [another online edition is: http://mailer.fsu.edu/~njumonvi/rev-hsc1.htm ]
  • Alan Brinkley, "The Public Professor" (A review of "Henry Steele Commager" by Neil Jumonville), New Republic, September 27, 1999, p. 42.
  • R. B. Bernstein, "Scholarship and Engagement: Henry Steele Commager as Historian and Public Intellectual: Review of Neil Jumonville, Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present," H-Law, H-Net Reviews, October, 1999. [URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3457 ]
• Royles, Elizabeth. obituary Henry Steele Commager obituary. Amherst Student.
• Peter Chew, "Black History Black Mythology?" (Background on the historiography of slavery)

Quotes

• Censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. — Henry Steele Commager
• The greatest danger we face is not any particular kind of thought. The greatest danger we face is absence of thought. — Henry Steele Commager, in Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent (1954).
• The Bill of Rights was not written to protect governments from trouble. It was written precisely to give the people the constitutional means to cause trouble for governments they no longer trusted. — Henry Steele Commager, Letter to the Editor, in The New York Times (1971).

External links

• Amherst College: Henry Steele Commager Project
• Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998)
• Henry Steele Commager Official Site
• Photo
• H-NET review of Neil Jumonville, Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism And The History Of The Present

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Name	Commager, Henry Steele
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Date of birth	October 25, 1902
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Date of death	March 2, 1998
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