Henry Steele Commager | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Henry Irving Commager (1902-10-25)October 25, 1902 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | March 2, 1998(1998-03-02) (aged 95) Amherst, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Spouses | |
| Academic background | |
| Education | University of Chicago (BPhil,MA,PhD) |
| Thesis | Struensee and the Reform Movement in Denmark[1][2] (1928) |
| Influences | |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | History |
| Sub-discipline | |
| Institutions | |
| Doctoral students | |
| Notable works |
|
| Influenced | R. B. Bernstein[3] |
Henry Steele Commager (October 25, 1902 – March 2, 1998) was an American historian. As one of the most active and prolific liberal intellectuals of his time, with 40 books and 700 essays and reviews, he helped definemodern liberalism in the United States.[4]
In the 1940s and 1950s, Commager was noted for his campaigns againstMcCarthyism and other abuses of government power. With hisColumbia University colleagueAllan Nevins, Commager helped to organize academic support forAdlai E. Stevenson in 1952 and 1956, andJohn F. Kennedy in 1960. Heopposed the Vietnam War and was an outspoken critic of presidentsLyndon B. Johnson,Richard Nixon, andRonald Reagan and what he viewed as their abuses of presidential power.
His principal scholarly works were his 1936 biography ofTheodore Parker; hisintellectual historyThe American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880s (1950), which focuses on the evolution of liberalism in the American political mind from the 1880s to the 1940s, and his intellectual historyEmpire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (1977). In addition, he edited a widely used compilation,Documents of American History; ten editions were published between 1938 and 1988, the last coedited with Commager's former student, Milton Cantor.
Commager was born Henry Irving Commager on October 25, 1902, inPittsburgh,Pennsylvania, the son of James Williams and Anne Elizabeth (Dan) Commager.[5] After his mother died when he was ten, he was raised by his maternal grandfather inChicago,Illinois.[6] He attended theUniversity of Chicago and earned degrees in history:Bachelor of Philosophy (1923),Master of Arts (1924), andDoctor of Philosophy (1928).[7][2] He lived inCopenhagen for a year researching his dissertation on the political reform movement inDenmark led byJohann Friedrich Struensee.[8]
Commager married Evan Alexa Carroll (died 1968) ofSouth Carolina in 1928.[2][9][10] The couple had three children:[10] Henry Steele Commager Jr. (1932–1984), known as Steele Commager, who became a classicist at Columbia University and wrote one of the leading books on the Roman poetHorace;[11] Elizabeth Carroll Commager; and Nellie Thomas McColl Commager (now Nell Lasch, wife of the historianChristopher Lasch). Evan Commager wrote several books, includingCousins,Tenth Birthday,Beaux, andValentine.
In 1979, Commager married Mary Powlesland,[12] a professor in Latin American studies, in Linton, England.
Commager died ofpneumonia at the age of ninety-five on March 2, 1998, in Amherst.[13]
Commager originally studiedDanish history, and wrote his PhD dissertation on the DanishphilosopherJohann Friedrich Struensee, a major reformer during theEnlightenment. Under the influence of his mentor at Chicago, the constitutional historianAndrew C. McLaughlin, Commager shifted his research and teaching interests toAmerican history. Another of his mentors was the colonial American historianMarcus W. Jernegan, for whom he later co-edited afestschrift (withWilliam T. Hutchison),The Marcus W. Jernegan Essays in American Historiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937).
Commager taught atNew York University from 1926 to 1939, atColumbia University from 1939 to 1956, and atAmherst College inMassachusetts from 1956 to 1992.[3][14] He retired in 1992 from the John Woodruff Simpson Lectureship, and died, aged 95, inAmherst, Massachusetts. Commager emphasized to his generations of students that historians must write not only for one another but for a wider audience.
Commager's first solo book was his 1936 biographyTheodore Parker: Yankee Crusader, a life of theUnitarian minister,transcendentalist, reformer, and abolitionistTheodore Parker; it was reissued in 1960, along with a volume edited by Commager collecting the best known of Parker's many writings. Two characteristic books were his 1950intellectual historyThe American Mind: An Interpretation of American Character Thought Since the 1880s and his 1977 studyThe Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment.
Commager was principally an intellectual andcultural historian; he was influenced by the literary historianVernon L. Parrington, but also worked in the fields of constitutional and political history. His work on this subject includes his 1943 series of controversial lectures,Majority Rule and Minority Rights, which argued for a curtailed scope forjudicial review, pointing out on the history of theUS Supreme Court's uses of judicial review to strike down economic regulatory legislation in the first decades of the twentieth century. Later, Commager espoused the use of judicial review by the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief JusticeEarl Warren to protect racial and religious minorities from discrimination and to safeguard individual liberties as protected by theBill of Rights and theFourteenth Amendment.
Commager was coauthor, withSamuel Eliot Morison, of the widely used history textThe Growth of the American Republic (1930; 1937; 1942; 1950, 1962; 1969; 7th ed., withWilliam E. Leuchtenburg, 1980; abridged editions in 1980 and 1983 under the titleConcise History of the American Republic).[15] His anthology,Documents of American History (1938), reaching its tenth edition (co-edited 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 andThe Spirit of Seventy-Six (the latter co-edited with his longtime friend and Columbia colleagueRichard B. Morris), are comprehensive collections of primary sources on the Civil War and the American Revolution as seen by participants.
With Richard B. Morris, he also 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 historianAlbert Bushnell Hart.)
At Columbia, Commager mentored a series of distinguished historians who earned their PhD degrees under his tutelage, includingHarold Hyman,Leonard W. Levy, andWilliam E. Leuchtenburg. They joined together in 1967 to present him with a festschrift, or commemorative collection of essays, dedicated to him, titledFreedom and Reform (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). When he moved to Amherst, an elite undergraduate college, he no longer mentored PhD candidates, but he mentored undergraduates, includingR. B. Bernstein, who later became a historian of the U.S. Constitution and a specialist in the era of theAmerican Revolution.
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 theNew Deal ofFranklin D. Roosevelt. Although he was skilled at scholarly research and analysis, he preferred to devise and expound sweeping interpretations of historical events and processes, while also making available primary sources so that people could study history for themselves. Commager was representative of a generation of like-minded historians widely read by the general public, includingSamuel Eliot Morison,Allan Nevins,Richard Hofstadter,Arthur Schlesinger Jr., andC. Vann Woodward.[4] 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 features abstruse deconstruction by experts, with statistics instead of stories, and is comprehensible now only to the initiated, with ethnocentrism ruling in place of common identity.[16]
Commager was a liberal interpreter of theConstitution andBill 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 opposedMcCarthyism in the 1940s and 1950s, thewar in Vietnam (on constitutional grounds), and what he saw as the rampant illegalities and unconstitutionalities perpetrated by the administrations ofRichard Nixon andRonald Reagan. One favorite cause was his campaign to point out that, because the budget of theCentral Intelligence Agency is classified, it violates the requirement ofArticle One of the Constitution that no moneys can be spent by the federal government except those specifically appropriated by Congress.[citation needed]
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 asFreedom, 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; andJefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment. He often was interviewed on television news programs and public-affairs documentaries to provide historical perspective on such events as theApollo 11 Moon landing and theWatergate crisis. Benjamin W. Cramer states:
Commager's lifelong advocacy of intellectual freedom, popular knowledge, and the historical interpretation of contemporary issues has had long-lasting influence on scholars and public advocates, though over the years his politics has been seen as either too liberal or too conservative by various detractors. He is ranked among such other great historians of his time as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Allan Nevins, Richard Hofstadter, and Samuel Eliot Morrison [sic].[17]
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Although at first Commager was not deeply concerned with race, he became an advocate for civil rights for African Americans, as he was for other groups. In 1949 he fought to allow the African-American historianJohn Hope Franklin to present a paper at theSouthern Historical Association and agreed to introduce him to the group. In 1953 theNAACP Legal Defense Fund asked Commager for advice for their argument before theSupreme Court for the case ofBrown v. Board of Education, but at the time he was not persuaded that this litigation would succeed on historical grounds, and so advised the lawyers.
In 1975 Commager wrote aDeclaration of Interdependence, and presented it to theWorld Affairs Councils of Philadelphia on October 24, 1975. It was signed in a ceremonial signing on January 30, 1976, atCongress Hall,Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia, by several members of Congress.[18] It was also "endorsed" by a number ofnon-governmental organizations andUnited Nations specialized agencies.[18]
The document stressed the importance ofinternational law, conservation of natural resources, disarmament, the world's oceans, and the peaceful exploration of outer space, among other things.[18]
When drafting the document Commager was assisted by an "Advisory Committee" includingRaymond Aron,Herbert Agar,Leonard Woodcock,Archibald MacLeish, and others.[18]
Commager and his co-authorSamuel Eliot Morison received vigorous criticism from African-American intellectuals and other scholars for their popular textbookThe Growth of the American Republic, first published in 1930. (Although Morison was responsible for the textbook's controversial section on slavery and references to the slave as "Sambo", and Commager was the junior member of the writing team when the book was first published and always deferred to Morison's greater age and academic stature, Commager has not been spared from charges of racism in this matter.)[19] The textbook was attacked for its uncritical depiction of slavery in America and its depiction of African-American life after emancipation and duringReconstruction. The original editions of the textbook published between 1930 and 1942 echoed the thesis ofAmerican Negro Slavery (1918) byUlrich Bonnell Phillips and the scholarship ofWilliam Archibald Dunning, relying on the one-sided personal records of slaveowners and portraying 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.[20] In 1944, theNAACP launched criticism of the textbook; by 1950, under pressure from students and younger colleagues, Morison, denying any racist intent (he noted that his daughter had been married toJoel Elias Spingarn, a former President of the 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 centuries, 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.[21]
August A. Meier, a young professor at a black southern college,Tougaloo College, and a former student of Commager, corresponded with Morison and Commager at the time, in an effort to get them to change their textbook; he reported that Morison "just didn't get it" and in particular did not understand the negative effects that the Sambo stereotype was having on young impressionable students. On the other hand, Meier found that Commager, although at first woefully unaware of black history, was openminded on the subject and willing to learn and change. Morison did not agree to remove Sambo until the fifth edition, which appeared in 1962.[22]
On June 22, 1953,Whittaker Chambers, an intellectual leader on the right, ridiculed Commager as suffering "the liberal neurosis" for stating that America is suffering repression "more violent, more reckless, more dangerous than any in our history."[23]
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| Religious titles | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Ware Lecturer 1952 | Succeeded by |
| Academic offices | ||
| Vacant Title last held by Dexter Perkins | Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions 1947–1948 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History 1952 | Succeeded by |
| Awards | ||
| Preceded by | American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal in History 1972 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Bruce Catton Prize 1990 | Succeeded by |
