Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998) 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.
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. After his mother died when he was ten, he was raised by his maternal grandfather in Chicago, Illinois. He attended the University of Chicago and earned degrees in history: Bachelor of Philosophy (1923), Master of Arts (1924), and Doctor of Philosophy (1928). He lived in Copenhagen for a year researching his dissertation on the political reform movement in Denmark led by Johann Friedrich Struensee.
Commager married Evan Alexa Carroll (died 1968) of South Carolina in 1928. The couple had three children: 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; 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, 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.
Career
Commager originally studied Danish history, and wrote his PhD dissertation on the Danish philosopher 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. Another of his mentors was the colonial American historian Marcus W. Jernegan, for whom he later co-edited a festschrift (with William T. Hutchison), The Marcus W. Jernegan Essays in American Historiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937).
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. 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 Unitarian minister, transcendentalist, reformer, and abolitionist Theodore 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 1950 intellectual history 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.