Background

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

Education

Commager changed schools several times. He matriculated at the University of Chicago, earning three degrees in history, a Bachelor of Philosophy in 1923, a Master of Arts in 1924, and a doctorate in 1928. In 1924 he spent a year in Copenhagen doing research on his dissertation, "Struensee and the Reform Movement in Denmark. "

During his career, Commager had also collected over 45 honorary degrees.

Career

Early in his career, Commager joined the faculty of New York University in 1926. After twelve years he switched to Columbia University, where he taught until 1960. During World War II, he also worked as a consultant to the Office of War Information and assisted the U.S. State Department in compiling a history of the war. During the Red Scare days after World War II, Commager took a stance against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigation of alleged communist activities. Commager would also step forward to urge Congress to keep America out of Indochina (now Vietnam). In 1956 he began a lengthy association with Amherst College, first as Smith Professor of History, then as Simpson Lecturer (and ultimately as professor emeritus) until 1991.

During his career, he also taught for short periods at Cambridge University, Boston University, University of Virginia, Brandeis University, and the University of London, among others.

Commager's reputation was made in 1930 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 Commager 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 he 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 Commager 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 1950 he published what was probably his best book, The American Mind, an intellectual history of America from 1890 through the 1940s. 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 the issue of constitutional protection of free speech and won a Special Award from the Hillman Foundation.

He 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.

The 1970s were a particularly fertile period as he 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.

Achievements

• 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. Starting in the 1930s, he published a torrent of histories, biographies, textbooks, anthologies and inquiries into the nature of democracy and the American mind. His essays in newspapers, journals and magazines were an important part of any dialogue on the issues of his day. In 1929 Commager received the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize for a first book in the field of European history. His book, The American Mind, became a classic and moved Commager into the rank of one of the top intellectual historians in the nation. He was awarded Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Gold Medal for History the American Academy of Arts and Letters had bestowed on him. His career was a tribute to hard work and a wide interest in the world of both past and present.
  
  Commager's other major works include such books as The Growth Of The American Republic (1930), Documents Of American History (1939), Theodore Parker (1936), Readings In American History (1939), Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent (1954), and Freedom And Order (1966), The American Character (1970), A Concise History Of The American Republic (1976), and Commager On Tocqueville (1993).

Works

More photos

• book

  • The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880's

    ( In a book written out of a passionate belief in the sta...)

  • The story of the Second World War

    ( An account of World War II from the perspective of hist...)

  • The Defeat of America: Presidential Power and the National Character

    (This collection of essays reflects on the United States’ ...)

  • The Blue and the Gray: Two Volumes in One

    (An extensive selection of original documents, articles, l...)

  • Britain Through American Eyes

    (A volume of excerpts from the writings of historical Amer...)

  • Was America A Mistake?: An Eighteenth-Century Controversy

    (A collection of documents from historical Americans and E...)

  • Freedom and Order: A Commentary on the American Political Scene

    (This title collects topically diverse essays on American ...)

  • Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent

    (Collected essays that expound on freedom--in all forms--a...)

  • Jefferson, Nationalism and the Enlightenment

    (A collection of essays and lectures from Henry Steele Com...)

Politics

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 favourite 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.

Views

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 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.

Membership

Commager was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as a Fellow of the American Scandinavian Society.

Personality

Despite Commager’s seemingly serious nature, he was nicknamed “Felix,” meaning happy in Latin. Although he had a memory for historical facts and details, he sometimes had difficulty remembering students’ names. When this would occur he would refer to his pupils as Mr. or Miss McGillicuddy.

Connections

On July 3, 1928, Commager married Evan Carroll, who eventually died in 1968. The couple had three children, Henry Steele, Elizabeth Carroll, and Nellie Thomas McCall.

On July 14, 1979, Commager married the former Mary Powlesland, a professor in Latin American studies, in Linton, England.

Father:

James Williams Commager

Mother:

Anne Elizabeth (Dan) Commager

ex-wife:

Evan Carroll

Daughter:

Elizabeth Carroll Commager

Daughter:

Nellie Thomas (Commager) McCall

Son:

Henry Steele Commager Jr.

He died of cancer in 1984.

Wife:

Mary Powlesland

References

• Henry Steele Commager : Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present
• Freedom and Reform: Essays in Honor of Henry Steele Commager -1st Edition/1st Printing