| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

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. 1

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. . . .

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