Henry Steele Commager - Career

Career

Commager, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, worked his way through the University of Chicago, earning the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees by the time he was twenty-eight. His mentors at Chicago included the colonial American historian Marcus W. Jernegan and the constitutional historian Andrew C. McLaughlin. He taught at New York University from 1930 to 1936, Columbia University (from 1936 to 1956), and Amherst College in Massachusetts from 1956 to 1992. He retired in 1992 from the John Woodruff Simpson Lectureship.

Commager insisted, and taught generations of his students, that historians must write not only for one another but for a wider audience. Commager once said about teaching, "What every college must do is hold up before the young the spectacle of greatness."

Commager married author Evan Alexa Carroll (b. Feb 4, 1904, d. Mar 28 1968) of Bennettsville, South Carolina on July 3, 1928; the couple had three children, Henry Steele Commager Jr., known as Steele Commager, who became an eminent classicist at Columbia University and wrote the leading book on the Roman poet Horace; Elizabeth Carroll Commager; and Nellie Thomas McCall Commager (now Nell Lasch, wife of the historian Christopher Lasch). On July 14, 1979, he married his second wife, the former Mary Powlesland, a professor in Latin American studies, in Linton, England. With her he lived out the rest of his days. Commager died of pneumonia at the age of ninety-five on March 2, 1998.

Commager originally studied Danish history, and wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the Danish philosophe Johann Friedrich Struensee, a major reformer during the Enlightenment. Under the influence of his mentor at Chicago, the constitutional historian Andrew C. McLaughlin, Commager shifted his research and teaching interests to American history.

Commager's first monograph was the 1936 biography, Theodore Parker: Yankee Crusader, a life of the Unitarian minister, Transcendentalist, reformer, and abolitionist Theodore Parker; it was reissued in 1960, along with a volume edited by Commager collecting the best of Parker's voluminous writings. His most characteristic books were his 1950 monograph The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Character Thought since the 1880s; and his 1977 study Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment. As these books suggest, he was principally an intellectual and cultural historian, deeply influenced by the literary historian Vernon L. Parrington, but he also worked in the fields of constitutional and political history. His work on this subject includes his controversial 1943 series of lectures, Majority Rule and Minority Rights, which argued for a sharply curtailed scope for judicial review, based on the history of the U.S. Supreme Court's uses of judicial review to strike down economic regulatory legislation in the first decades of the twentieth century. Later, Commager came to embrace the vigorous use of judicial review by the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren to protect racial and religious minorities from discrimination and to safeguard individual liberties as protected by the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment.