Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present. By Neil Jumonville. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xviii, 328 pp. $49.95, isbn 0-8078-2448-8.)
 

By treating the writing of history as a literary art, Henry Steele Commager (1902––1998) enjoyed a substantial midcentury audience for his studies of American national consciousness and for his renowned textbooks, The Growth of the American Republic (1930), written with Samuel Eliot Morison, and A Pocket History of the United States (1943), written with Allan Nevins.

Neil Jumonville's biography aims to rescue Commager's liberal commitment from dismissal and neglect. Styled after its subject's popularizing prose, Henry Steele Commager is informed and entertaining. There are oversights——no indication whatsoever of where Commager stood in the controversial 1948 campaign, for example——but also anecdotal gems, including an inquisitorial 1959 letter from William F. Buckley Jr. wanting to know whether Commager's middle name was adopted in homage to Stalin. In its ultimate ambition, however, the reconsideration of liberalism, the study falls short of success.

Commager was born in Pittsburgh but was raised primarily in Chicago by his maternal grandfather, a Lutheran pastor and ardent Danish nationalist. Commager's University of Chicago dissertation on the Danish Enlightenment figure Johann Friedrich Stuense won the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize in 1929. Yet Commager had already published in the Oregon Historical Quarterly and thought of himself as an Americanist. He held full-time teaching positions in American history at New York University (1926––1938), Columbia University (1938––1956), and Amherst College (1956––1971).

At the height of his influence, Commager was an intellectual in New York, although never one of the "New York intellectuals." ("Did they pay?" a puzzled Commager replied when Jumonville asked why he had never written for Partisan Review.) He wrote for daily papers, lectured widely, and was immersed in concerns of the present. Jumonville erects a schema of doubtful value——the stacks-bound "scholar" versus the engaged "intellectual"——and takes Commager as an admirable example of the latter. He admits that Commager's thought became shallower as his research distinction gave way to scholarly self-disappointment, including his inability to complete planned biographies of William Jennings Bryan and Joseph Story.

While Jumonville hopes to evoke new appreciation for midcentury liberalism, few doubters will be persuaded. The "character" approach of Commager's The American Mind (1950) still seems flawed by its substitution of a fictive individual consciousness for a multivalent intellectual history. A failure forthrightly to address Stalinism and the dilemmas it presented to democrats, likewise, mars Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent (1954), Commager's otherwise stirring defense of heresy. Indeed, Commager's admiration for "collective regimentation" and reference to Native Americans' "blind savagery"——both comments made in the 1930s and reported though unremarked by Jumonville——point to persistent shortcomings of reformism.

Christopher Lasch, who married Commager's daughter Nell, expressed a poignant view that readers of Henry Steele Commager may find more to the point. In the 1950s and 1960s, wrote Lasch in a letter to Jumonville, he could discern in his father-in-law "no interest in the reconsideration of liberalism that emerged after World War II, no interest even in replying to its critics (that is, to its critics on the left)——which didn't leave us much to talk about."

Christopher Phelps
Ohio State University
Mansfield, Ohio