Neil Jumonville. Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1999. Pp. xviii, 328. $49.95.
 

The problem with this curious volume is contained in the tenuous relationship between the title and the subtitle. In making the life of historian Henry Steele Commager (1902––1998) emblematic of the fate of midcentury liberalism, Neil Jumonville has written not so much a biography as a series of ruminations on, among other things, the forgotten virtues of consensus historians, the need for historians to participate in public debate, and the limitations of the present-day multicultural Left. These are defensible positions, but Jumonville is at pains to demonstrate that his preoccupations illuminate Commager's life and work. His tendency to hold that Commager's critics often had the better arguments (judgments he does not always sustain) only deepens the mystery of why he believes Commager should be reconsidered.

Commager's prominence as a historian for over fifty years certainly commands attention. Overcoming a difficult childhood, Commager was extraordinarily productive. Among his professional accomplishments were The Growth of the American Republic (1927), a landmark textbook coauthored with Samuel Eliot Morison; The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s (1950), an important entry in American intellectual history; books on Alexis Tocqueville and the Enlightenment; and his editorship of "The New American Nation" series and the indispensable Documents of American History. Jumonville seems uncertain what to make of these achievements. He lightly praises the textbook and slights the editorial work entirely. Given the centrality of The American Mind in Commager's career, Jumonville handles it rather perfunctorily. He briefly notes its emphasis on pragmatism and reports the contemporary reviews before judging it analytically weak and overly general. Missing is any engagement with its thesis or specific judgments.

Jumonville's overriding interest is Commager's liberal journalism. A sensibility rather than an ideology, Commager's liberalism rejected theory (read Marxism) as an a priori straitjacket, celebrated dissent because it enriched the marketplace of ideas, and sided with the "little folk" against the interests. Bringing this mixture of Thomas Jefferson and John Dewey to bear on Constitutional issues, Commager weighed in during the New Deal on such knotty problems as judicial review and executive power, reversing his position when political balances later shifted. Particularly noteworthy were his trenchant and often lonely attacks on McCarthyite loyalty tests and his early and strenuous criticism of the American war in Vietnam. On these matters, Jumonville admires Commager's commitment more than his intellectual depth. Pointing to Commager's "impatience with philosophical precision" (p. 112), Jumonville contends Commager did not address the concerns of Roger Baldwin and Sidney Hook, who saw Commager's anti-anticommunism as a naive belief in infinite tolerance that was oblivious to consequences.

Jumonville's struggle to discern Commager's significance is apparent in his inability to give a coherent account of Commager's liberalism. He initially places Commager in the Progressive camp, noting his indebtedness to Vernon Louis Parrington's view that American history was a struggle between the economically privileged and the economically disadvantaged. The Depression, he holds, forced Commager to blend Jeffersonian ends with Hamiltonian means. That characterization obsures how difficult it often is to separate ends and means and accepts at face value Commager's self-understanding. More perplexing is Jumonville's extended defense of consensus historians against their New Left critics. He seems to think that showing that Louis Hartz, Richard Hofstadter, and Henry Nash Smith had leftist backgrounds refutes charges they supported the social order. The issue, however, is the character of their work, which he does not explore. In any event, since consensus historians rejected both Commager's reliance on Progressive dichotomies and his optimism and few New Leftists rallied around his Jeffersonianism or his preference for high culture, Commager seems a bystander to this particular quarrel.

Nor does Jumonville capture Commager's significance as a public figure in his insistence that Commager's career exemplified the inherent tension between the scholarship function of objective presentation of research to peers and the intellectual one of accessibly written partisanship. This needlessly rigid framework reduces "scholarly" to "academic" and "intellectual" to "opinionated." It can not explain how Charles Beard, Hofstadter, and Commager's son-in-law, Christopher Lasch, to name three historians read by public and professionals alike, combined deep thinking, clear writing, and political commitment to reorient the understanding of the past while simultaneously advancing public debate. Jumonville's discussion invites the conclusion that Commager's contributions were not of this order. That is hardly a black mark, since few are. Had he not struggled so hard to make Commager "representative," Jumonville might have appreciated that Commager's success as a public historian owed much to his singular, atypical character.

Daniel H. Borus
University of Rochester