Henry Steele Commager Interview

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• published: 07 Dec 2011
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http://thefilmarchive.org/ Henry Steele Commager (October 25, 1902 -- March 2, 1998) was an American historian who helped define Modern liberalism in the United States for two generations through his forty books and 700 essays and reviews. 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 1880's (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 In addition, he edited one of the most influential compilations of American historical documents, Documents of American History, which went through ten editions between 1938 and 1988 (the tenth, and last, coedited with Commager's former student Milton Cantor.) He won attention as one of the most active and prolific liberal intellectuals of his time, and he based his activism in support of the causes he advocated. In the 1940s and 1950s he was notable for his campaigns against the use of government power against leftist groups known as McCarthyism. With his Columbia University colleague Allan Nevins, Commager helped to organize academic support for Adlai E. Stevenson and John F. Kennedy. Later in his career, he opposed the war in Vietnam, and was an articulate and energetic critic of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, and of what he charged were their abuses of presidential power. 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 New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He downplayed the tedium of scholarly analysis in favor of sweeping interpretations of grand historical events, while at the same time providing easy access to primary sources so that people could study history for themselves. Commager was representative of a whole generation of like-minded historians who were widely read by the general public, including Samuel Eliot Morison, Allan Nevins, Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and C. Vann Woodward. Commager's biographer Neil Jumonville has argued that this style of influential public history has been lost in the 21st century because political correctness has rejected Commager's open marketplace of tough ideas. Jumonville says history now comprises abstruse deconstruction by experts, with statistics instead of stories, and is now comprehensible only to the initiated, while ethnocentrism rules in place of common identity. 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 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. While Commager was not deeply concerned with race in the early part of his career, he eventually became an advocate for civil rights for African-Americans, as he already 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. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Steele_Commager