Talk:Henry Steele Commager

Suppression of Viewpoints Violates Site Rules

To anonymous user 148.87.1.171

If you plan to revert the criticism of this historian by the respected historian Leon F. Litwack, please submit it to Wikipedia arbitration. It is not acceptable to remove valid text that you personally disagree with and for which you provide no citation or reasoning. Skywriter 04:55, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

To Wwoods:

It is astounding that there is an edit war ongoing on here, and on the co-author Morison's page over a serious criticism of a textbook that was widely used in schools all over the United States for so many years. Are these pages now candidates for POV and fact tags? Anyone who wishes to remove commentary by a respected scholar is doing so based on subjective opinion of one who was not likely the object of the verbal assault contained for three decades in this required textbook. Why in the world would anyone insist on deleting specific criticism from a noted historian of a famous textbook wherein the textbook was criticized by others, yet it took 30 years for the authors to modify their repugnant viewpoint?

This is viewpoint suppression of the worst kind.

Are the people who have repeatedly removed Litwack's criticism (and earlier wanted to remove all comments concerning the authors' racial views) not aware of the hurtful nature of these lines in a required textbook?

Is there a rule on Wikipedia that racism will not be discussed, or it is to be tamped down? If so, please be so kind as to point to the policy or rule.

Or, is this political correctness in play? Skywriter 02:53, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Is this all there is?

Taking no position one way or the other on the criticism of Commager and Morison's textbook, but is this really all there is to say about a scholar who lived 95 years and "wrote (or edited) over forty books and over 700 journalistic essays and reviews"? Dodiad 07:27, 30 October 2006 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dodiad (talk • contribs) 07:28, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

You are welcome to add what you believe is appropriate. Skywriter 13:38, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

vandalism by radicals will not be tolerated here

you have a minor point which you blow up to be the domininating factor. Like Bush you are finished. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Longsun (talk • contribs) 00:22, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Verification

In the summary of her recent edit, ClerksGirl513 says: I added personal information that I knew as I know his wife Mary; she is my aunt.

It's probably true, but can the information she added actually be verified? SteveRamone 00:18, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

The contribution violates Wikipedia rule against original research. There must be independent corroborating source. Skywriter (talk) 08:04, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Please do not remove factual, well-sourced text

On August 27, 2009, Longsun deleted vast swath of historical information without explanation. The information has been saved and includes the following, nearly an entire subsection. The subheading was also inexplicably removed. I invite discussion of these deletions now re-entered into the article.

Criticism of textbook

For some, wording in Commager's widely used textbooks cast shadows over his reputation as a historian. Commager and his co-author were criticized for racial bias in their representation of African American people and for the way they portrayed the history of the United States during slavery and after the Civil War during the era of Reconstruction.

Beginning in 1944, African-American leaders repeatedly asked Commager and his Growth of the American Republic co-author Samuel Eliot Morison to remove the following passage, which first appeared in the original 1930 edition of their widely used history textbook and was repeated in the 1937, 1942, and 1950 editions:

As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears, there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any other class in the South from its ‘peculiar institution.’ The majority of slaves were adequately fed, well-cared for, and apparently happy. Competent observers reported that they performed less labor than the hired man of the Northern states. Their physical wants were better supplied than those of thousands of Northern laborers, English operatives, and Irish peasants; their liberty was not much less than that enjoyed by the North of England ‘hinds’ or the Finnish torpare. Although brought to America by force, the incurably optimistic Negro soon became attached to the country, and devoted to his ‘white folks.’ Slave insurrections were planned -- usually by the free Negroes – but invariably betrayed by some faithful black; and trained obedience kept most slaves faithful throughout the Civil War. . . If we overlook the original sin of the slave trade, there was much to be said for slavery as a transitional status between barbarism and civilization.

-- from Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic(New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 537-539.

The entry was not removed until 1962 despite requests that began in 1944 for change to the earlier editions that began.

In the Spring 2004 edition of History of Education Quarterly, Jonathan Zimmerman wrote:

Starting in 1950, for example, African Americans petitioned well-known race liberals Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison to revise their popular textbook, Growth of the American Republic, which declared that the American slave—or "Sambo," as the text called him—was "adequately fed, well cared for, and apparently happy." Privately, the authors joked about Black complaints—"bushman squawks," Morison called them—against their book. "Felix the nigger-baiter is funny!" Morison told Commager, using the latter's nickname. Miffed by attacks upon his own liberal credentials, Morison stressed that his daughter was married to Jewish NAACP President Joel Spingarn—and that "Sambo" had been Morison's childhood nickname. Eventually, Morison agreed to remove the term "pickanninies"; in future editions, he quipped, black children would be described only as "nice little seal-brown darlings." But he insisted upon retaining "Sambo," "Uncle Daniel," and several other images of slave docility. "I'll be damned if I'll take them out for... anybody," Morison told Commager.

The authors finally removed the passages in the fifth edition of their textbook which appeared in 1962. The deleted passages echo the racially biased thesis of American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. This view, popularized by most white historians of the Dunning School but not by black historians such as W.E.B. DuBois, relied on the one-sided personal records of slave-owners and portrayed slavery as a mainly benign institution.

"The Phillips school of slavery historiography was not limited to the South or to a faction within the historical profession; as recently as 1950, for instance, Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, of Harvard and Columbia Universities respectively, propagated the traditional interpretation in one of the leading college textbooks of the era," according to the American Social History Project at the City University of New York.

Skywriter (talk) 10:04, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

References

Inherent problem with the editing of this article

Over a long period, fans of this historian have destroyed or removed citations from this article that lay out the central issues with the widely used textbook. The attempts all try to soften and make excuses for the content and to weaken the criticisms of historians and others who conversed with Commager and his co-author over several decades. Placing the blame for bias on the co-author doesn't address the issue. They were not senior and junior authors. They were co-authors, both at Ivy League universities. Please stop revising history. Referring readers to the article on Morison does no good either. Morison has avid fans who regularly remove all criticisms of their guy to make him also appear as a saint. Skywriter (talk) 02:33, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

More than a year ago, Longsun reverted well-documented criticism of Commager and this is what he wrote: 10:40, August 27, 2009 Longsun (talk | contribs) (11,571 bytes) (removed excess references alleged insensitive racial language in just one of over forty books he wrote (or edited). Prehaps Skywriter can find other examples of Commanger's racism, or prehaps not.) (undo)

Now, Longsun offered his personal opinion and not scholarly or other reliable sources for the revert activity. For more than a year Longsun has been pressing the point of view that discussion of racial bias in the single most popular book during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s and 1960s in schools in the United States should be censored in the bio of one of the co-authors, the subject of this biography, because Longsun says so. To my knowledge, Longsun has cited no reliable source for the position Longsun is taking. It is purely personal viewpoint and it is hardly a neutral viewpoint, which is what is required here at Wikipedia. Now I understand Longsun feels passionately about this subject and believes other editors should go along because Longsun says so. The many people who asked Commager to remove racially insensitive tracts from his most important book felt strongly, too, especially during the period when segregation was legal in the United States, that racially biased statements were and still are unacceptable. The struggle to persuade Commager to delete the hurtful wording went on for several decades. The struggle to note that there was a struggle against segregation and racial bias in the United States is not going to be deleted because Longsun says so. Now Longsun could come up with some persuasive arguments quoting one scholar or another on this subject but until that happens, the material Longsun wants deleted will stay with this article because it is true and well-documented and it is an important piece of history. Skywriter (talk) 02:55, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

I was a student of Professor Commager and he was my mentor until his death in 1998. That said, I agree that the deleted criticisms of THE GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC should be restored, with the following caveats:

(1) Morison *was* the senior author in the collaboration. He was born in 1886, which made him 16 years older than Commager. THE GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC is, in essence, a revision and expansion of Morison's old OXFORD HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. Commager was very deferential to Morison until the latter's death in 1976.

(2) In the writing and revision of the textbook, Morison was principally responsible for Volume I and Commager was principally responsible for Volume II, though each historian wrote chapters dealing with wars in the other's volume (for example, Commager wrote on the Civil War in Volume I and Morison wrote on World War I -- and later on World War II -- in volume II). Both Commager's and Morison's biographers have noted that Morison was responsible for the racist language in Volume I, and that Commager deferred to Morison.

(3) The criticism should note that the publisher of THE GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC, Oxford University Press (U.S.), spaced out the revised editions as follows -- 1930, 1938, 1942, 1950, 1957, 1962, 1969, 1980. I *suspect* that the reason that the revisions sought on racial grounds from 1944 on were not put into effect until the 1962 edition was that the publisher and the senior author were persuaded of their necessity and desirability only when the civil rights revolution was in full swing, which occurred between 1957 and 1962.

(4) Professor Commager always was sympathetic to the cause of civil rights, as witness for example his edited anthology THE STRUGGLE FOR RACIAL EQUALITY, but sometimes he did not change his thinking as quickly as his students would have wanted him to do. Richard Kluger, SIMPLE JUSTICE, chronicles the attempt in 1952-1953 by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to enlist Commager as a historian and expert witness for their interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause as barring segregation, and Commager, citing the conventional wisdom of the historical field, declined. This does not mean that he was racist but rather that he was not as quick to embrace the emerging historical consensus on civil rights and segregation as were such scholars as John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward.

(5) In sum, as someone who knew Professor Commager well between 1971 and his deatn in 1998, and as someone who knows and admires the work of Professor Litwack, and as an experienced historian myself, I urge that editors re-examine the deleted material and restore it to the article. Rbb1787 (talk) 22:34, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

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