Editing Henry Steele Commager (section)

==Criticism==
Commager and his co-author [[Samuel Eliot Morison]] received vigorous criticism from African-American intellectuals and other scholars for their popular textbook ''The Growth of the American Republic'', first published in 1930. (Although Morison was responsible for the textbook's controversial section on slavery and references to the slave as "Sambo", and Commager was the junior member of the writing team when the book was first published and always deferred to Morison's greater age and academic stature, Commager has not been spared from charges of racism in this matter.)<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/commager.html|title=Henry Steele Commager: American Public Intellectual|last=Jumonville|first=Neil|website=Harvard Square Library|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120204034539/http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/commager.html|archive-date=4 February 2012|access-date=2018-10-25}}</ref>  The textbook was attacked for its uncritical depiction of slavery in America and its depiction of African-American life after emancipation and during [[Reconstruction era of the United States|Reconstruction]]. The original editions of the textbook published between 1930 and 1942 echoed the thesis of [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11490 ''American Negro Slavery''] (1918) by [[Ulrich Bonnell Phillips]] and the scholarship of [[William Archibald Dunning]], relying on the one-sided personal records of slaveowners and portraying slavery as a mainly benign institution. As the historian Herbert Gutman said, this scholarship focused on the question: "What did slavery do for the slave?" Its answer was that slavery lifted the slaves out of the barbarism of Africa, Christianized them, protected them, and generally benefited them.<ref>{{cite web |title=Historiography |url=http://web.gc.cuny.edu/ashp/doing/doinghistoriography.html |access-date=August 23, 2020}}</ref> In 1944, the [[NAACP]] launched criticism of the textbook; by 1950, under pressure from students and younger colleagues, Morison, denying any racist intent (he noted that his daughter had been married to [[Joel Elias Spingarn]], a former President of the NAACP), reluctantly agreed to most of the demanded changes. Morison refused, however, to remove repeated references to the anti-abolitionist caricature of [[Sambo (racial term)|"Sambo"]], which he claimed were vital in understanding the racist nature of American culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an era when even the most enlightened progressive thinkers routinely explained many aspects of human behavior as being a result of innate racial or ethnic characteristics.{{sfn|Gossett|1997|p=497}}

August A. Meier, a young professor at a black southern college, [[Tougaloo College]], and a former student of Commager, corresponded with Morison and Commager at the time, in an effort to get them to change their textbook; he reported that Morison "just didn't get it" and in particular did not understand the negative effects that the Sambo stereotype was having on young impressionable students. On the other hand, Meier found that Commager, although at first woefully unaware of black history, was openminded on the subject and willing to learn and change.  Morison did not agree to remove Sambo until the fifth edition, which appeared in 1962.{{sfn|Jumonville|1999|p=147}}

On June 22, 1953, [[Whittaker Chambers]], an intellectual leader on the right, ridiculed Commager as suffering "the liberal neurosis" for stating that America is suffering repression "more violent, more reckless, more dangerous than any in our history."<ref>
{{cite magazine
| first = Whittaker
| last = Chambers
| author-link = Whittaker Chambers
| title = Is Academic Freedom in Danger?
| magazine = Life
| publisher = Time, Inc.
| url = https://books.google.com/books?id=CEgEAAAAMBAJ
| page = 91
| date = 22 June 1953
| access-date = 2 February 2018}}</ref>