(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xviii, 328 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $49.95)

There are several parts to, and scholarly contributions made by, Neil Jumonville's book. First is an intellectual biography of the historian Henry Steele Commager (1902-98), who in July 1980 became the first person to hold the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair in American History at the University of Washington. Second is a slighter biographical sketch of Allan Nevins (1890-1971), Commager's best friend and fellow historian. Third is a historiographical exploration featuring Commager and Nevins but examining others as well. This focuses on the relation between academic history or specialized scholarship and popular history or journalism, including the career implications for these practitioners; and on the emergence and decline of intellectual history and American studies between the 1920s and the 1970s. Fourth is a historical perspective on liberalism in the 20th century, as seen through Commager's life.

Jumonville's multifaceted subject matter and his postboomer interpretive lens define the texture and tone of the volume. Interestingly, Commager's achievements in retrospect are not substantial enough to overshadow the other subjects discussed. Commager was brilliant, but his journalistic impulses overrode scholarly discipline. He was a prolific author, but professional historians evaluated his contribution as marginal. He was a professor for almost 50 years, but Jumonville characterizes his teaching style as more akin to that of a Chautauqua lecturer than a superior teacher of undergraduates and graduate students. Jumonville rightly presents Commager as an example of the scholar-citizen or public intellectual. Yet he was usually on the periphery rather than at the center of the intersections of various crosscurrents. Commager appears to have been more illustrative than causal in his role. He reflects certain characteristics of intellectual history and American studies, but he does not seem to have been particularly influential in those developments. Jumonville is such a conscientious historian that his profound interest in the issues he poses does not obscure the ultimate lack of significance of his celebrity subject. Fortunately, the book as a whole is greater than the sum of its various parts.

Historians who came of age intellectually during and after the 1960s generally have viewed the 1940s and 1950s as even more remote than the immediate postwar generation viewed the interwar years. Jumonville's perspective is postboomer in that he attempts to present a more sympathetic picture of historians and American scholarship in the postwar era than is fashionable currently. His analysis is consistently rigorous, but it is especially forceful when comparing and contrasting older liberals and radicals with the more recent New Left and Cultural Left. Chapters 8 and 9, “The Character and Myth of Historians at Midcentury, 1937-1997” and “Liberals and the Historical Past, 1948-1997,” should be required reading for students in American historiography classes.

The rejection of Commager's style of 1950s intellectual history and American studies by a younger cohort was part of a generational disagreement between acutely different visions of American culture and society. Should America be built on the midcentury values of a color-blind liberal pluralism, integration, majority rule, shared identity, and a prevention of economic and political exploitation as Commager hoped? Or should it be constructed on the Cultural Left values of multiculturalism, ethnic and subcultural identification, minority rights, personal liberation, and a prevention of cultural alienation?

 Commager and the older American studies figures were at least as politically radical and activist as their younger counterparts have turned out to be. It is only in the cultural realm, because they could not anticipate our current multicultural ethic, that Commager's generation now seems less “liberal”.... In many ways they hoped for a far more harmonious and open liberal society than we now propose. (p. 229)

Robert Allen Skotheim
Huntington Library