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Henry Steele Commager (October 25, 1902 – March 2, 1998) was an 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, fought against McCarthyism, amd opposed the Vietnam War. His obituary appeared in the Amherst Student newspaper. *
Textbook criticized for racial bias and whitewashing slavery
Commager and his Growth of the American Republic co-author Samuel Eliot Morison were asked by black leaders to remove the following passage from the 1930 edition of the widely used history textbook:
- As for “Sambo,” whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears, there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any other class in the South for its “Peculiar Institution.” … Although brought to America by force, the incurably optimistic Negro soon became attached to the country, and devoted to his white folks.
According to several sources, the entry was not removed until 1962 despite requests for change.
In the Spring 2004 edition of History of Education Quarterly, Jonathan Zimmermanwrote the following[http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/heq/44.1/zimmerman.html
- Starting in 1950, for example, African Americans petitioned well-known race liberals Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison to revise their popular textbook, Growth of the American Republic, which declared that the American slave—or "Sambo," as the text called him—was "adequately fed, well cared for, and apparently happy." Privately, the authors joked about Black complaints—"bushman squawks," Morison called them—against their book. "Felix the nigger-baiter is funny!" Morison told Commager, using the latter's nickname. Miffed by attacks upon his own liberal credentials, Morison stressed that his daughter was married to Jewish NAACP President Joel Spingarn—and that "Sambo" had been Morison's childhood nickname. Eventually, Morison agreed to remove the term "pickanninies"; in future editions, he quipped, Black children would be described only as "nice little seal-brown darlings." But he insisted upon retaining "Sambo," "Uncle Daniel," and several other images of slave docility. "I'll be damned if I'll take them out for ... anybody," Morison told Commager. *
The authors finally removed the passage in the 1962 version of their text book. The passage echoes the thesis of American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. This view, popularized by most white historians until the mid twentieth century, relied on the one-sided personal records of slave-owners and portrayed slavery as a mainly benign institution. *
"The Phillips school of slavery historiography was not limited to the South or to a faction within the historical profession; as recently as 1950, for instance, Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, of Harvard and Columbia Universities respectively, propagated the traditional interpretation in one of the leading college textbooks of the era," according to the American Social History Project at the City University of New York. *
Pulitzer Prize winning historian Leon F. Litwack found the widely used textbook offensive saying, "The textbook was my first confrontation with history. I asked my 11th grade teacher for the opportunity to respond to the textbook’s version of Reconstruction, to what I thought were distortions and racial biases.(I had already read Howard Fast’s Freedom Road.) The research led me to the library—and to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, with that intriguing subtitle: An Essay Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. Armed with that book, I presented what I thought to be a persuasive rebuttal of the textbook."*
Commager was a member of the Dunning School of Reconstruction historians.
As co-editors of The New Americn Nation Series, Commager and Richard B. Morris cowrote the introduction to Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, the book that, they concluded, is a "scholarly convincing Reconstruction of what is indubitably the most controversial chapter in our history."
Selected list of books by Commager
- The Growth of the American Republic (with Samuel Eliot Morison, New York: Oxford University Press, 1930 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 A Concise History of the American Republic, rev. 1983.
- Documents of American History (1934 et al.)
- Yankee Crusader (1936)
- Readings in American History (with Allan Nevins, 1939)
- Majority Rule and Minority Rights (1943)
- 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)
- War, Presidential Power, and the National Character (1974)
- Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment (1976)
- 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)
References
- Neil Jumonville, 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. *
- Black History Black Mythology? (Background on the historiography of slavery)
- Zimmerman, Jonathan, "Brown-ing the American Textbook: History, Psychology, and the Origins of Modern Multiculturalism". History of Education Quarterly (Spring, 2004, Vol. 44, No. 1)
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
- 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).
External links
"Henry Steele Commager"