Henry Steele Commager
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Henry Steele Commager (October 25, 1902 - March 2, 1998) was a noted American historian who wrote (or edited) over forty books and over 700 journalistic essays and reviews. In addition, he taught at New York University, Columbia, and Amherst College. He was an outspoken defender of civil liberties and fought against McCarthyism as well as the Vietnam War.
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Obituary in Amherst Student Newspaper
"by ELIZABETH ROYLES, Managing News Editor
John Woodruff Simpson Lecturer Emeritus Henry Steele Commager died Monday at the age of 95 in his Amherst home after a battle with pneumonia.
Remembered fondly by his colleagues, Commager was an internationally-known American historian who loved to travel and give lectures. "I don't think I ever had a conversation with him that I didn't take something away from, whether it was something I could quote or an anecdote," said Professor of History Hugh Hawkins.
Commager came to Amherst in 1956 from Columbia University and taught at the College for 36 years.
Hawkins said "it caused a great stir" when Commager transferred from Columbia to Amherst, because of his celebrity. "I was in Europe at the time, and I read it in a newspaper there," Hawkins remembered.
Commager was known for both his stimulating lectures and his published writings. Hawkins remembered that when Commager was well into his eighties he taught a course on rewriting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which gathered a large student following.
On the importance of teaching, Commager once said he couldn't imagine not teaching young people., "What every college must do," he said, "is hold up before the young the spectacle of greatness, not necessarily in the teachers but in history or in life or in literature."
Out of his published books, which number more than 20, one of Commager's most famous was The American Mind (1951). Hawkins also remembered an American history textbook which Commager co-authored, The Growth of the American Republic, as being particularly memorable. "I was an undergraduate when it came out," he said, "and I thought, 'This is wonderful to read! These people know how to write!' It wasn't like most textbooks."
Personally, Hawkins remembered Commager as "a character," quite different from most other Amherst professors. Commager was a fellow at Peterhouse in Cambridge, England. In College processions, Hawkins said, Commager would wear his Peterhouse cap and gown, which made him stand apart from the rest of the professors because he was the only one wearing tan, the Peterhouse color. "It impressed people," Hawkins said.
In a March 2 letter to the Amherst community, President Tom Gerety reported that Mary Commager spoke of holding a memorial service for her husband later in the year, although the burial will be private.
Commager is survived by his wife, daughters Nell and Lisa, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren."
Selected list of books authored by Commager
- The Growth of the American Republic (with Samuel Eliot Morison, New York: Oxford University Press, 1930 [as Oxford History of the United States; 7th ed., 1980.]. Revised and abridged edition with Samuel Eliot Morison and William E. Leuchtenberg published by Oxford University Press in 1980 as Concise History of the American Republic, rev. 1983.
- Documents of American History (1934 et al.)
- Theodore Parker: Yankee Crusader (1936)
- Readings in American History (with Allan Nevins, 1939)
- Majority Rule and Minority Rights (1943)
- The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880s (1950)
- Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent (1954)
- The Search for a Useable Past and Other Essays in Historiography (1965)
- Freedom and Order (1966)
- The Defeat of America: War, Presidential Power, and the National Character (1974)
- Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment (1976)
- 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)
Reference
- Neil Jumonville, Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)
- R. B. Bernstein, Scholarship and Engagement: Henry Steele Commager as Historian and Public Intellectual: Review of Neil Jumonville, Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present,H-Law, H-Net Reviews, October, 1999. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=8053943300064.
Quotes
- Censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. - Henry Steele Commager 1902 - 1998
- The greatest danger we face is not any particular kind of thought. The greatest danger we face is absence of thought. -- Henry Steele Commager, in Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent (1954).
- The Bill of Rights was not written to protect governments from trouble. It was written precisely to give the people the constitutional means to cause trouble for governments they no longer trusted. -- Henry Steele Commager, in The New York Times (1971).