Henry Steele Commager

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Henry Steele Commager (October 25, 1902 – March 2, 1998) was an American historian who wrote (or edited) over forty books and over 700 journalistic essays and reviews. He won fame as one of the most active and prolific public intellectuals of his time, and he based his activism in support of the causes he advocated, including civil rights, opposition to the war in Vietnam, and criticism of the constitutional agendas of the administrations of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, on his authority as a historian and educator.

Widely used textbooks he co-authored were criticized for racial bias in their representation of African American people and for the way they portrayed the history of the United States after the Civil War during the era of Reconstruction.

Contents 1 Summary of Life and Career 2 Criticism of textbook 3 Selected publications 4 References 5 Quotes 6 External links

[edit] Summary of Life and Career

Commager, who was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, worked his way through the University of Chicago, having earned the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees by the time he was twenty-eight. 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 originally studied Danish history, and wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the Danish philosopher and reformer 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. 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. (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.)

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, deeply influenced by the 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.

Commager was an ardent defender 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 administration 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.

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.

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."

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 under Mary's care at their home in Amherst.

[edit] 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 first opportunity^{[citation needed]} that they had to make this revision since the controversy began. The deleted 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 American 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." Foner's prize-winning book presented a vision of the era of Reconstruction far closer to that originally presented by Du Bois than that presented by Phillips, or by Morison in his chapter on Reconstruction in The Growth of the American Republic.

The principal resistance to the requested edits of The Growth of the American Republic came from Morison rather than from Commager, as indicated in the evidence and quotations presented in the foregoing paragraphs.

[edit] 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 through 1988)
• 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 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.)
• Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples, arranged for one volume (New York: Greenwich House, 1991, ISBN 0-517-06019-1)
• Commager on Tocqueville (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993)

[edit] References

1. ^ Jonathan Zimmerman, "Brown-ing the American Textbook: History, Psychology, and the Origins of Modern Multiculturalism", History of Education Quarterly, 44(1), Spring 2004.
2. ^ ^{a b} American Social History Project on the "Phillips school of slavery".
3. ^ 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)

[edit] 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).

[edit] External links

• Amherst College: Henry Steele Commager Project
• Henry Steele Commager: American Public Intellectual
• Henry Steele Commager Dies At Age 95
• 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