Henry Steele Commager
Henry Steele Commager | |
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Born | Henry Irving Commager October 25, 1902 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
Died | March 2, 1998 Amherst, Massachusetts, U.S. | (aged 95)
Spouses |
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Academic background | |
Education | 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 define modern liberalism in the United States.[4]
In the 1940s and 1950s, Commager was noted for his campaigns against McCarthyism and other abuses of government power. With his Columbia University colleague Allan Nevins, Commager helped to organize academic support for Adlai E. Stevenson in 1952 and 1956, and John F. Kennedy in 1960. He opposed the Vietnam War and was an outspoken critic of presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan and what he viewed as their abuses of presidential power.
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 1880s (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 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.
Background
Commager was born Henry Irving Commager on October 25, 1902, in Pittsburgh, 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 in Chicago, Illinois.[6] He attended the University of Chicago and earned degrees in history: Bachelor of Philosophy (1923), Master of Arts (1924), and Doctor of Philosophy (1928).[7][2] He lived in Copenhagen for a year researching his dissertation on the political reform movement in Denmark led by Johann Friedrich Struensee.[8]
Commager married Evan Alexa Carroll (died 1968) of South 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 poet Horace;[11] Elizabeth Carroll Commager; and Nellie Thomas McColl Commager (now Nell Lasch, wife of the historian Christopher Lasch). Evan Commager wrote several books, including Cousins, Tenth Birthday, Beaux, and Valentine.
In 1979, Commager married Mary Powlesland,[12] a professor in Latin American studies, in Linton, England.
Commager died of pneumonia at the age of ninety-five on March 2, 1998, in Amherst.[13]
Career
Commager originally studied
Commager taught at New York University from 1926 to 1939, at Columbia University from 1939 to 1956, and at Amherst College in Massachusetts from 1956 to 1992.[3][14] He retired in 1992 from the John Woodruff Simpson Lectureship, and died, aged 95, in Amherst, 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 biography Theodore Parker: Yankee Crusader, a life of the
Commager was principally an intellectual and
Textbooks and editing
Commager was coauthor, with
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 historian Albert Bushnell Hart.)
At Columbia, Commager mentored a series of distinguished historians who earned their PhD degrees under his tutelage, including
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
Commager was a liberal interpreter of the
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 11 Moon landing and the Watergate 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]
Civil rights
This article needs additional citations for verification. (October 2013) |
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 historian
Declaration of Interdependence
In 1975 Commager wrote a
The document stressed the importance of international 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" including Raymond Aron, Herbert Agar, Leonard Woodcock, Archibald MacLeish, and others.[18]
Criticism
Commager and his co-author
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]
Selected publications
- Oxford History of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1930). 7th ed.: The Growth of the American Republic (1980) (with William E. Leuchtenburg)
- Documents of American History (1934 and later editions through 1988)
- Theodore Parker: Yankee Crusader (1936)
- The Heritage of America: Readings in American History for High Schools (1939) (with Allan Nevins)
- Commager, Henry Steele (1943). Majority Rule And Minority Rights (1st ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.(1943)[24]
- The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880s (1950)
- The Blue and the Gray: The Story of the Civil War as Told by Participants (1950)
- Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent (1954)
- The Standard Building of Our Nation (1955) (with Eugene Barker and Walter Prescott Webb)
- The Spirit of Seventy-six: The Story of The American Revolution as Told by Participants (1958) - two volumes
- 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 (1975)
- 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)
See also
References
Citations
- ^ Jumonville 1999, p. 281.
- ^ a b c "Commager Chronology". Amherst, Massachusetts: Amherst College. Retrieved August 23, 2020.
- ^ a b Bernstein, R. B. (1999). "Scholarship and Engagement: Henry Steele Commager as Historian and Public Intellectual". H-Net. Retrieved August 23, 2020.
- ^ a b Jumonville 1999.
- ^ Jumonville 1996, p. 224; Jumonville 1999, p. 5.
- ^ Jumonville 1999, pp. 7–8.
- ^ Jumonville 1999, pp. 9–10, 13–14.
- ^ Jumonville 1999, pp. 13–14.
- ^ Jumonville 1999, pp. 23, 261.
- ^ a b "Collection: Henry Steele Commager Papers". Amherst College. March 1, 2023. Retrieved March 2, 2023.
- ^ Roots 1994, p. 108.
- ^ Jumonville 1999, p. 263.
- ^ Jumonville 1999, p. 275.
- ^ Jumonville 1999, p. 120.
- ^ Adams 1967, pp. 251ff.
- ^ Lindstrom, Andy (Fall 1999). "Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998): An American Mind in the American Century". Research in Review. Tallahassee, Florida: Florida State University. Archived from the original on December 23, 2010. Retrieved August 23, 2020.
- ^ Cramer 2015, p. 139.
- ^ a b c d "Archived copy". Archived from the original on July 30, 2013. Retrieved March 24, 2013.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) - ^ Jumonville, Neil. "Henry Steele Commager: American Public Intellectual". Harvard Square Library. Archived from the original on February 4, 2012. Retrieved October 25, 2018.
- ^ "Historiography". Retrieved August 23, 2020.
- ^ Gossett 1997, p. 497.
- ^ Jumonville 1999, p. 147.
- ^ Chambers, Whittaker (June 22, 1953). "Is Academic Freedom in Danger?". Life. Time, Inc. p. 91. Retrieved February 2, 2018.
- ^ Green 1944.
Works cited
- Adams, D. K. (1967). America in the Twentieth Century: A Study of the United States Since 1917. London: Cambridge University Press. OCLC 1024177408. Retrieved August 23, 2020.
- Cramer, Benjamin W. (2015). "Commager, Henry Steele". In Chapman, Roger; Ciment, James (eds.). Culture Wars: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints and Voices. Vol. 1 (2nd ed.). Abingdon, England: Routledge. pp. 138–139. ISBN 978-1-317-47351-0.
- Gossett, Thomas F. (1997). Race: The History of an Idea in America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-802582-5.
- Green, John Raeburn (1944). "Review of Majority Rule and Minority Rights, by Henry Steele Commager". California Law Review. 32 (1): 111–118. JSTOR 3477586.
- Jumonville, Neil (1996). "The Origin of Henry Steele Commager's Activist Ideas". The History Teacher. 29 (2): 223–241. JSTOR 494742.
- —— (1999). Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press.
- Roots, E. Brian (1994). "Commager, Henry Steele Jr.". In ISBN 978-0-313-24560-2.
Further reading
- Brinkley, Alan (September 27, 1999). "The Public Professor". The New Republic. Vol. 221, no. 13. p. 42. Archived from the original on January 12, 2012. Retrieved August 23, 2020.
- Chew, Peter (August 1969). "Black History Black Mythology?". American Heritage. Vol. 20, no. 5. Archived from the original on March 27, 2006. Retrieved August 23, 2020.
External links
- Henry Steele Commager at the Database of Classical Scholars
- Henry Steele Commager Papers at the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections
- 1967 St. Louis Literary Award Recipient
- Amherst College: Henry Steele Commager Project
- Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998)
- Henry Steele Commager Official Site (2013 archive), Copyright 2000-2013 - Mary Commager
- Henry Steele Commager at Find a Grave
- review of Neil Jumonville, Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism And The History Of The Present at H-NET
- The short film Longines Chronoscope with Henry Steele Commager is available for free viewing and download at the Internet Archive.
- http://www.mlfilms.com/productions/m_and_i Archived December 16, 2014, at the Wayback Machine Memory and Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress Documentary]