Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) was one of the public intellectuals from Columbia University who played a significant role in postwar American politics and society. During the 43-year tenure of the university's recently retired president Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia had risen from a prestigious local college for the city's elite, many of whom had transferred allegiance to Harvard and Yale, to a world class university. The concentration of media in New York City frequently brought the university's most prominent members to national attention.
Most New Yorkers had no idea who Commager, Nevins or colleagues like Mark Van Doren were but the educated class frequently read the articles they published in magazines and newspapers or heard them on radio talk shows. Public policy often reflected the opinions of this intellectual elite, Nevins hosted an afternoon radio show, “Adventures in Science.” Commager was co-author of the survey The Growth of the American Republic, widely used in schools as a textbook since the first edition was released in 1930. He also often wrote book reviews and commentaries for The New York Times and Herald Tribune.
Commager frequently wrote and reviewed for The New York Times and the Herald Tribune. His pieces for The Times in 1946 revealed his thinking. They included:
An article for the Sunday magazine in January expressing his hope that the newly formed United Nations would usher in an era of peace, succeeding where the Legion of Nations had failed. This was a widespread hope in the first months after the end of the war. By April, the reemergence of Big Power politics and nationalism on the world scene had begun to cast a shadow on that hope.
In February, Commager reviewed The Growth of Constitutional Power, a book by Carl Brent Swisher, a political scientist from Johns Hopkins in The Sunday Times Book Review. In his review, Commager wrote that by the nation's ability to weather two world wars and a Depression while other governments collapsed proved the power and strength of our Constitutional form of government. Commager considered himself a Constitutionalist, although his interpretation of that document was very different from today's Tea Party zealots. Unlike them, he prized its flexibility within defined limits guaranteeing individual rights and liberty. In his book, Swisher warned of two major challenges to constitutional government and individual freedom. One was the growth of a "fourth department" of government, the bureaucratic regulatory bodies and the other was the rise of large corporations which controlled much of the nation's economy but did not operate by democratic principles. Commager trusted that our system of checks and balances would prove adequate to handle these developments, unforeseen by the Founding Fathers. Commager believed that Swisher’s proposal to democratize corporations would not work since the American public was not in favor of granting the government the “sharp increase in planning and in the centralization of authority" that this solution would require.
A review in June of Religion in America by Willard L. Sperry, Dean of the Harvard Divinity School. This book, Commager wrote, was mostly a survey of religious denominations in the United States rather than an interpretative history of the Americanization of religion, a story Commager found more compelling and still largely untold. Americans, he wrote, were generally religious but not particularly devout. He noted that in America religion was essentially a social activity Spiritual experience usually took a backseat to good works and fellowship. Throughout much of American history, church membership had waxed and waned. Commager’s comments in his review reflected the very different religious landscape of 1946 when mainline Protestantism was still at least nominally the dominant religious tradition. In the 1920s and 1930s as the population shifted from small town to big cities, church membership sharply declined. As the population shifted again, this time to the suburbs in the postwar period, church membership resurged, with most mainline Protestant denominations reaching membership peaks in the 1950s and ‘60s. Since then, the cultural divide has led to a steady loss of membership in mainline denominations as former adherents drifted steadily to secular humanism on one hand and to conservative evangelicalism on the other. Meanwhile the denominations often divided over contentious social issues.
On October 6, Commager also reviewed As He Saw It, Elliott Roosevelt’s recollections of the key wartime diplomatic conferences he had attended with his father, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Commager found the book interesting for its personal notes but questioned the authenticity and accuracy of the younger Roosevelt's recollections supporting his implied thesis that FDR wanted to end imperialism at war's end and that he had a problem with the British war effort, political leadership and postwar plans. Commager came strongly to the defense of our British ally and doubted that FDR had the jaundiced view of Britain that his son presented. While he agreed with Elliott Roosevelt that for the sake of a lasting peace some accommodation had to be made with the Soviet Union , he wrote that this should not come at the expense of our deep ties to Great Britain.
An article for the October 20 magazine expressed his grave concern over the growing clout of organized labor in American politics, specifically the PAC formed by the CIO. Commager believed that labor had as much right as any other interest group to participate in the electoral process, but he vigorously objected to the practice of the CIO PAC of demanding that the candidates it supported adhere to a specific voting agenda, much as the Tea Party does today. He deemed this practice a threat to representative democracy and the two-party system since it was polarizing. The American system, he argued, was strong because it required the building of a broad consensus which in turn required the ability of elected representatives to compromise and negotiate rather than being held captive to a rigid agenda. This article drew a sharp rebuttal from the head of the CIO PAC. With its sizable financial campaign resources, organizing ability and large membership, the CIO had been very successful in the primaries and nominating conventions but this success contributed to a Republican sweep in November. The general public was fed up with the wave of postwar strikes and shortages. In some contests, Republican candidates successfully exploited ties between the CIO and the Communist Party, painting their CIO-backed opponents as tools of the Soviet Union.
In his review on Nov 17 of Lincoln’s War Cabinet by Burton J. Hendrick, a three time Pulitzer Prize winner, Commager wrote that many presidents had troubles with their cabinets, most recently Truman with Wallace and Byrnes, but none faced the series of Constitutional crises provoked by ambitious members of Lincoln’s cabinet who unsuccessfully sought repeatedly to undermine his authority.
In the 1948 presidential contest both Truman and Dewey supported the tenets of the liberal consensus while disagreeing on many specific policy points. Both the ideological right and the ideological left mounted challenges. The liberal consensus prevailed decisively. In the next couple of decades, while both the right and the left established local and regional bases, the liberal consensus prevailed on the national level.
Commager died in 1998 at age 95. He had remained a prominent figure throughout much of the rest of the twentieth century, He was a vocal opponent of anything he felt threatened the democratic consensus. This included McCarthyism, the war in Vietnam, the perceived excesses in the student protest movement, the out-sized influence of lobbyists and pressure groups and the abuse of presidential power that he saw in the Johnson, Nixon and Reagan White Houses. He was an active supporter of Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy.
The liberal consensus fell apart politically in the 1960s over the war in Vietnam, civil rights, the various liberation movements on the left and the rise of aggressive social conservatism on the right. The exploitation of these differences by politicians and demagogues were the downfall of consensus politics leading to the polarized politics of today. The liberal consensus also went out of fashion among historians and social scientists who increasingly talked more about multiculturalism and identity politics than about a need for consensus. Once branded as a left winger by his opponents on the right in the immediate postwar period, Commager is now dismissed by the academic left as a moderate conservative whose ideas have become outdated.