Henry Steele Commager - Criticism

Criticism

Commager and his co-author Samuel Eliot Morison received vigorous criticism from African American intellectuals and other scholars for their very 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 although 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.) The textbook was attacked for its favorable depiction of slavery in America and of African American life after emancipation and during Reconstruction. The original editions of the textbook published between 1930 and 1942 echoed the thesis of American Negro Slavery (1918) by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, relying on the one-sided personal records of slave-owners 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. In 1944, the NAACP launched criticism of the textbook; by 1950, under pressure from students and younger colleagues, Morison, while denying any racist intent (he noted that his daughter had been married to Joel Elias Spingarn, the 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", 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. August A. Meier, a young professor at a black southern college, Tougaloo College, and a former student of Commager, corresponded with Morison and Commager during this period of time in an effort to get them to change their textbook and reported that Morison "just didn't get it" and didn't understand the negative effects that the Sambo stereotype was having on young impressionable students. Meier, on the other hand, found that Commager, although at first woefully unaware of black history, was open-minded on the subject and willing to learn and change. Morison did not agree to remove Sambo until the next edition, which appeared in 1962.