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Henry Steele Commager: Biography and Much More from Answers.com

️Wed Jul 01 2015

Henry Steele Commager

Henry Steele Commager (born 1902) was an American historian who achieved much fame as a textbook author and as an editor of books of documents. He also earned a reputation as an historian of ideas and as a participant in the debates on the public issues of his day.

Henry Steele Commager was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on October 25, 1902, the son of James Williams and Anne Elizabeth (Dan) Commager. His parents moved to Toledo and then to Chicago when Commager was growing up, necessitating several changes in schools.

Commager matriculated at the University of Chicago, earning three degrees in history, a Ph.B. in 1923, an A.M. in 1924, and a Ph.D. in 1928. In 1924 Commager spent a year in Copenhagen doing research on his dissertation, "Struensee and the Reform Movement in Denmark."

Although his early interest was in Danish history and although that interest persisted throughout his life, Commager made his reputation and did most of his writing on American history. In 1926 he became an instructor of history at Columbia University. He married Evan Carroll on July 3, 1928, and the couple had three children, Henry Steele, Elizabeth Carroll, and Nellie Thomas McCall.

In 1929 he received the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize for a first book in the field of European history, but his reputation was made the next year when he became the co-author of The Growth of the American Republic with Samuel Eliot Morison. The book became one of the best-selling texts in the subject and went through many editions. He next wrote several texts in collaboration with others and published Documents of American History (1934), which was also widely used. In 1936 he wrote Theodore Parker, a biography of the New England radical. In 1939 he edited, with Allan Nevins, another book of documents, The Heritage of America. In the 1930s Commager was a Progressive historian, a self-styled Parrington, who was isolationistic and a believer in an economic interpretation of American history.

World War II changed his views. In 1942 he gave the James W. Richards' Lectures at the University of Virginia. These appeared under the title Majority Rule and Minority Rights (1943) and argued for the implementation of the will of the majority. In 1942 Commager and Allan Nevins also published America: The Story of a Free People, which presented a sympathetic view of American life. Commager lectured for the Office of War Information in England in 1943 and was active in writing and giving broadcasts all during the war. In the spring and summer of 1945 he assumed the temporary rank of colonel and acted as an information and education specialist for the United States Army in Paris.

His experience in the war led him to publish The Story of the Second World War in 1945. This popular account consisted of a series of stories and vignettes which was not a critical success. In 1947-1948 he became Pitt Professor of American History at Cambridge University.

In 1950 he published what was probably his best book, The American Mind, an intellectual history of America from 1890 through the 1940s. The book became a classic and moved Commager into the rank of one of the top intellectual historians in the nation. The same year he also edited a two-volume work, The Blue and the Grey, which included eyewitness accounts from participants on each side during the Civil War. In 1953 he was Gottesman Professor at the Royal University of Uppsala; the next year he was the Zuskin Professor at Brandeis.

By this time Commager's concern had shifted to preserving minority rights, particularly against the witch-hunting techniques of Senator Joseph McCarthy. His book Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent (1954) spoke to issue of constitutional protection of free speech and won a Special Award from the Hillman Foundation.

In 1956, in a surprising move, Commager left Columbia to become a professor of history at Amherst College. Amherst made him Emerson Professor of History and Simpson Lecturer in 1971. The move to Amherst did not diminish his tremendous productivity. The year he arrived was also the year of the publication of Joseph Story, a biography that Commager had been working on for years.

Commager continued to write in a number of areas: contemporary political events, constitutional rights and theory, historiography, and the enlightenment. He also wrote books for juveniles as well as editing books of documents and historical series. By 1967 Harold W. Hyman and Leonard W. Levy counted over 400 items in the Commager corpus, including the authorship of 19 books and the editorship of 22 others. In this list were such books as Freedom and Order: A Commentary on the American Political Scene (1966), which was retrospective of his own work, and Was America a Mistake? (1967), an edited collection of the European arguments over the consequences of America's discovery.

Reaching his 65th birthday did not still Commager. The 1970s were a particularly fertile period as Commager wrote The Discipline of History (1972), ideas about historiography; Britain Through American Eyes (1974), selections from traveler's accounts; The Defeat of America: Presidential Power and the National Character (1974), a book inspired by the Nixon debate; Jefferson, Nationalism and Enlightenment (1975), a consideration of that leader's ideas; and The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (1977), a comparative study of the impact of ideas on two continents.

In 1979, Commager wrote the text for Mort Kuenstler's 50 Epic Paintings of America, and he continued to write prolifically into the 1980s and 1990s. He co-authored The Study and Teaching of History (1980) with Raymond Muessig, and wrote the introduction for The Civil War Almanac (1983). In 1992 he published two new works, Commager on Tocqueville, which met mixed reviews, and The Story of the Second World War, a critical success. In 1994 he wrote the text for a book of paintings by Mort Kuenstler, The American Spirit.

In 1984, Commager suffered a personal loss when his son, Henry Steele Commager, Jr., also an historian and author, died of cancer. His son's death created some confusion in biographies, as it was sometimes reported incorrectly to be the death of Commager, Sr.

Commager also continued as a visiting professor or lecturer at a number of universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1975 and 1977), McGill University (1977), Indiana University (1978), University of Washington (1981), and University of Illinois (1982). He had collected over 45 honorary degrees to add to his Guggenheim Fellowship, his Fellowship in the American Scandinavian Society, and his membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Gold Medal for History the academy had bestowed on him. His career was a tribute to hard work and a wide interest in the world of both past and present.

Summary of Life and Career

Commager, who was born on 25 October 1902 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 28. He taught at Columbia University (from 1936 to 1956)and Amherst College (from 1956 to 1992).

Commager studied Danish history, and wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the Danish philosopher and reformer Johann Struensee. Under the influence of his mentor at Chicago, the constitutional historian Andrew C. McLaughlin, Commager shifted his research and teaching interests to American history. He 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 reference work. 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), treat the Civil War and the American Revolution, respectively, as seen by participants.

With Richard B. Morris, he also co edited the 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.

Commager's first solo book was his 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 The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment. As these books suggest, he was principally an intellectual and cultural historian, but 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.

Commager was an ardent defender of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He opposed McCarthyism in the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. war in Vietnam (on constitutional grounds), and the rampant illegalities and unconstitutionalities perpetrated by the administration of Richard M. Nixon. 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 I of the U.S. Constitution that no moneys can be spent by the federal government except those specifically appropriated by Congress.

Commager also wrote many essays on history for popular magazines and newspapers (many of them collected 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 frequently 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.

Commager insisted 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 died at age 95 in his Amherst home of pneumonia.

Criticism of textbook

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, African-American leaders repeatedly asked Commager and his Growth of the American Republic co-author Samuel Eliot Morison to remove the following passage, which first appeared in the original 1930 edition of their widely used history textbook and was repeated in the 1937, 1942, and 1950 editions:

As for “Sambo,” whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears, there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any other class in the South for its “Peculiar Institution.” ... Although brought to America by force, the incurably optimistic Negro soon became attached to the country, and devoted to his white folks.

In the Spring 2004 edition of History of Education Quarterly, Jonathan Zimmerman wrote,

Starting in 1950, for example, African Americans petitioned well-known race liberals Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison to revise their popular textbook, Growth of the American Republic, which declared that the American slave—or "Sambo," as the text called him—was "adequately fed, well cared for, and apparently happy." Privately, the authors joked about Black complaints—"bushman squawks," Morison called them—against their book. "Felix the nigger-baiter is funny!" Morison told Commager, using the latter's nickname. Miffed by attacks upon his own liberal credentials, Morison stressed that his daughter was married to Jewish NAACP President Joel Spingarn—and that "Sambo" had been Morison's childhood nickname. Eventually, Morison agreed to remove the term "pickanninies"; in future editions, he quipped, black children would be described only as "nice little seal-brown darlings." But he insisted upon retaining "Sambo," "Uncle Daniel," and several other images of slave docility. "I'll be damned if I'll take them out for ... anybody," Morison told Commager.^[1]

The authors finally removed the passage in the 1962 version (fifth edition) of their text book. The passage echoes the thesis of American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. This view, popularized by most white historians until the mid twentieth century, relied on the one-sided personal records of slave-owners and portrayed slavery as a mainly benign institution.^[2]

"The Phillips school of slavery historiography was not limited to the South or to a faction within the historical profession; as recently as 1950, for instance, Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, of Harvard and Columbia Universities respectively, propagated the traditional interpretation in one of the leading college textbooks of the era," according to the American Social History Project at the City University of New York.^[2]

Pulitzer Prize winning historian Leon F. Litwack found the widely used textbook offensive saying, "The textbook was my first confrontation with history. I asked my 11th grade teacher for the opportunity to respond to the textbook’s version of Reconstruction, to what I thought were distortions and racial biases.(I had already read Howard Fast’s Freedom Road.) The research led me to the library—and to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, with that intriguing subtitle: An Essay Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. Armed with that book, I presented what I thought to be a persuasive rebuttal of the textbook."^[3]

As co-editors of The New Americn Nation Series, Commager and Richard B. Morris cowrote the introduction to Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, the book that, they concluded, is a "scholarly convincing Reconstruction of what is indubitably the most controversial chapter in our history."

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. Leuchtenberg 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)
Theodore Parker: Yankee Crusader (1936)
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)
The Search for a Useable 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

^ Jonathan Zimmerman, "Brown-ing the American Textbook: History, Psychology, and the Origins of Modern Multiculturalism", History of Education Quarterly, 44(1), Spring 2004.
^ ^a ^b American Social History Project on the "Phillips school of slavery".
^ Interview with Leon F. Litwack at History Matters.

Neil Jumonville, Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)
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. [1]
Royles, Elizabeth. obituary Henry Steele Commager obituary. Amherst Student.
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

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