Henry Steele Commager and immanent critique of American actions

Need I add that every great American leader, from Washington and Jefferson to Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, acknowledged a responsibility of our membership in the great community of civilization? That responsibility can best be fulfilled by drawing on our own experience and invoking our own authority to solve national problems and applying the lessons of that experience to the challenges of the future.

That quote is from the historian Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998) from his 1993 book, Commager on Tocqueville.

Commager was one of the best known Amerian historians during his career. And his writing on current issues was a big influence on my political thinking when I was an undergraduate. I've had a lot of other influences since then, too.

But I've been reading some of Commager's work recently in the process of trying to inform myself better about the history of US dealings with native peoples in North America. And it has reminded me of what impressed me about his approach.

Commager was a liberal Democratic thinker and activist with an anti-imperialist inclination and a focus on intellectual history. In the early years of the Cold War, he was a more convential "Cold War liberal," a term which once carried a similar polemic edge to what "corporate Democrat" has today. But by the 1960s, he became a sharp critic of the Vietnam War.

In December 1965, the year that President Lyndon Johnson put American troops in a much ore expansive and direct role for US troops in Vietnam on the side of South Vietnam against North Vietnam, Commager opened his presentation in a debate over the war with:

Speaking of one of the greatest of crises Abraham Lincoln said, just over a century ago:

"If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object in confidence of putting an end to the slavery agitation"- let us substitute: to the Vietnamese crisis. "Under the operation of that policy the agitation has not only not ceased but has constantly augmented." (Speech, Springfield, 1858) [text from "Debate on Vietnam Policy, Alvin Friedman & Henry Steele Commager" Massachusetts Review 7:2 {Spring, 1966}]

This is something that Commager did well that I still appreciate. He invoked iconic American historical figures to make policy and political points about the preseent, while still taking the original context seriously.

And that's a big reason that I'm still reluctant to embrace the sort of casual revisionism that we see quite a bit now on the left and center-left that writes off a large part of the American democratic tradition as hopelessly tainted by the shortcomings of democracy in earlier times. In 2019, Abraham Lincoln still mostly gets a pass because of his status as the Great Liberator in the Civil War. (Just to be clear, I'm a big Lincoln fan myself.)

I'm very much in favor of a critical approach to history. And obviously our collective view of historical events and actors changes over time as the ways we see the world develop and become more informed. I think it's safe to say that in 100 years or so, people will look back at all of us who are of voting age in 2019 and criticize us for our collective irresponsibility on the climate crisis. Because it is appalling. And at least a lot of people right now also recognize it's appalling.

If we have a nuclear war, we can only hope there will still be surviving members of humanity around to trash us for our mind-boggling irresponsibility on nuclear arms proliferation.

But as long as there are still people around to think about history, it's important to be cautious about "anachronism," which is applying current standards to past events without taking adequate recognition of what standards people in those previous times were applying to themselves and each other and the actual conditions in which they were acting. The Britain of 1215-1225 when the Magna Carta was established was seriously backwards compared to the American colonies of 1776. But the Magna Carta played a large role in how the American revolutionaries understood their own rights in real time and served as an effective part of the revolutionary ideology of 1776 and the following years. (We're talking about a tradition that in 1776 was 550 years old!)

And that was despite the fact that King John, his sucessor Henry III, and the British nobles in the early 13th century would have regarded it as absurd to even consider something like the US Bill of Rights. But the historical path to the Bill of Rights nevertheless passed through the Magna Carta and events that led to its establishment. Anyone who regards liberal democratic freedoms as important can't condemn the Magna Carta as hopelessly backwards and reactionary because it didn't comport with cutting-edge democratic standards of 2019. Or of 1776.

Commager's respect for the Jeffersonian tradition and Enlightenment reason didn't prevent him from passing highly critical judgments on bad decisions and mistaken assumptions of the present and much more recent past. His criticism would become even sharper as the war wet on. But he was pretty sweeping in his criticisms of the Vietnam War in 1965:

The consequences of our Vietnamese involvement to our moral standards are already painfully familiar. It means deception; it means putting out arguments and claims which we do not ourselves believe; it means lying to the American people; it means that we are losing our friends throughout the globe; it means we are coarsening our own moral fiber, getting hardened to bombing innocent people and destroying the country on pretexts that will not stand examination. It means ever sharper divisions in our own society, and the upsurge of the forces of intolerance and militarism. It means a pervasive indulgence in that sin which may well be the unpardonable sin of the New Testament, the sin of supposing that we are a special people, exempt from those rules of morality which apply to all others. [my emphasis]

Commager was not indulging in Biblical hermeneutics here. But he was making a forceful point against American Exceptionalism. And there was probably some Niebuhrian theological influence there, too.

And he was adapt at judging American assumptions about other countries by the standards Americans applied to their own actions:

Does Russia have a vital interest in Cuba because Castro is an outpost of Communism? When Russia attempted to display that [in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962], we prepared for war .... Surely if we have a vital interest in distant Vietnam we must concede Russia a vital interest in Iran, Irak, and Hungary •••. And even more obviously, if we have a vital interest in Vietnam what are we to say to China's interest: is it something less than vital? ...

More, to assume that a request for military aid even from an independent South Vietnam would somehow justify our intervention there requires us to concede that a request for military aid from an independent Cuba justifies the intervention of the Soviet in that island. That was not what we thought in 1962. [my emphasis]

Commager was very good at making an immanent critque of American actions within the context of American history and democratic ideals.