United States political historian Henry Steele Commager was the first scholar to hold the Bullitt Chair in American History at the University of Washington, occupying the chair during the winter and spring quarters of 1981. During his lifetime Commager also held teaching positions at New York University (1926-1935), Columbia (1936-1956), and Amherst (1956-1992) and visiting positions at Cambridge and Oxford. A prolific author, editor, journalistic essayist, reviewer, political activist, and lecturer, Commager was the recipient of both the Gold Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Bruce Catton Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Society of American Historians .
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on October 25, 1902, Commager earned his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago by the time he was twenty-six. His forty-five year long teaching career began at New York University in 1926 while Commager was still completing his Ph.D. Of the more than forty books that he either wrote or edited, Commager’s best known works include The Growth of the American Republic (1930), which he co-wrote with Samuel Eliot Morison, Documents of American History (1934), Theodore Parker: Yankee Crusader (1936), The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880s (1950), Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent (1954), The Spirit of Seventy Six (1958) with Richard Morris, Freedom and Order (1966), and Commager on Tocqueville (1992), published when Commager was 89.
In addition to his work as an author and editor, Commager submitted more than 234 book reviews for the New York Herald Review during the 1920s and 30s, and from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s he was the lead essayist for the New York Times Magazine. Focusing on the historical context of contemporary social issues and aiming his work at a general audience Commager published over 700 articles during his lifetime providing essays for journals such as Saturday Review, Atlantic, the New Republic, the Nation, Harper's, and The Scholastic, a magazine for junior and senior high students.
Arguably the most well-known historian of his time, Commager’s background in history informed his engagement with the politics of his day. During the 1940s and 50s, for example, he lectured on the importance of intellectual freedom and against McCarthyism, basing his argument on his interpretation of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. He was an outspoken critic of the United States war in Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s and urged the impeachment of Richard M. Nixon in 1973. He questioned American defense and foreign policies during the presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush (1981-1993). As a frequent guest on radio and television news programs and public-affairs documentaries Commager appeared on shows as diverse as The Dick Cavett Show (1980) and Bill Moyer's World of Ideas (1988). He was invited to the White House on several occasions, the last time in 1992 for a dinner honoring the Queen of Denmark. Commager had studied at the University of Copenhagen as an American-Scandinavian Foundation fellow from 1924 to 1925, wrote his dissertation on Struensee and the Reform Movement in Denmark, and was a Fulbright Professor of American History at the University of Copenhagen in 1956. During his lifetime Commager traveled widely lecturing at universities and public venues in Sweden, Germany, London, Mexico, France, and Spain. Henry Steele Commager died at his home in Amherst, Massachusetts on March 2, 1998. He was 95.
Sources:
Neil Jumonville, “Henry Steele Commager: American Public Intellectual,” Notable American Unitarians, http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/commager.html; Richard B. Bernstein, “Henry Steele Commager: Educator, Essayist, and Champion of the Constitution,” Henry Steele Commager, http://www.commager.org/default.asp.
Authored by:
Deborah McNally, University of Washington, Seattle
