Although the United States lagged far behind European countries in instituting concrete social welfare policies, the earliest and most comprehensive philosophical justification for the welfare state was produced by the American sociologist Lester Frank Ward ( 1841 – 1913 ) whom the historian Henry Steele Commager called " the father of the modern welfare state ".

Henry Steele Commager ( October 25, 1902 – March 2, 1998 ) was an American historian who helped define Modern liberalism in the United States for two generations through his forty books and 700 essays and reviews.

Commager, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, worked his way through the University of Chicago, earning the B. A., M. A., and Ph. D. degrees by the time he was twenty-eight.

Commager's first monograph was the 1936 biography, Theodore Parker: Yankee Crusader, a life of the Unitarian minister, Transcendentalist, reformer, and abolitionist Theodore Parker ; it was reissued in 1960, along with a volume edited by Commager collecting the best of Parker's voluminous writings.

Commager was coauthor, with Samuel Eliot Morison, of the widely-used history text The Growth of the American Republic ( 1930 ; 1937 ; 1942 ; 1950, 1962 ; 1969 ; 7th ed., with William E. Leuchtenburg, 1980 ; abridged editions in 1980 and 1983 under the title Concise History of the American Republic ).

Commager was representative of a whole generation of like-minded historians who were widely read by the general public, including Samuel Eliot Morison, Allan Nevins, Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and C. Vann Woodward.

Although Commager was not deeply concerned with race in the early part of his career, he eventually became an advocate for civil rights for African-Americans, as he was for other groups.

In 1953 the NAACP Legal Defense Fund asked Commager for advice for their argument before the Supreme Court for the case of Brown vs Board of Education, but at the time he was not persuaded that this litigation would succeed on historical grounds, and so advised the lawyers.

( 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.

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 was criticized by some African-American scholars for his treatment of American slavery in early editions of his book The Growth of the American Republic, which he co-wrote with Henry Steele Commager and William E. Leuchtenburg.

The prize was awarded to Dumas Malone ( 1984 ), C. Vann Woodward ( 1986 ), Richard B. Morris ( 1988 ), Henry Steele Commager ( 1990 ), Edmund S. Morgan ( 1992 ), John Hope Franklin ( 1994 ), Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. ( 1996 ), Richard N. Current ( 1998 ), Bernard Bailyn ( 2000 ), Gerda Lerner ( 2002 ), David Brion Davis ( 2004 ), and David Herbert Donald ( 2006 ).

To quote the historian Henry Steele Commager: " Ward was the first major scholar to attack this whole system of negativist and absolutist sociology and he remains the ablest .... Before Ward could begin to formulate that science of society which he hoped would inaugurate an era of such progress as the world had not yet seen, he had to destroy the superstitions that still held domain over the mind of his generation.

He was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and educated at Columbia University, where his mentor for the Ph. D. degree was Henry Steele Commager.

* The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis: With Excerpts from an Essay on Watergate ( 1988 ), coauthor Henry Steele Commager, Seven Locks Press, hardcover: ISBN 0-932020-61-5, 1990 reprint: ISBN 0-932020-85-2, 2000 paperback: ISBN 0-932020-60-7 ; examines the Iran-Contra affair

Later, Commager came to embrace the vigorous use of judicial review by the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren to protect racial and religious minorities from discrimination and to safeguard individual liberties as protected by the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment.

While at Columbia, his professors included Harry Carman, Henry Steele Commager, and David Donald.

Commager married author Evan Alexa Carroll ( b. Feb 4, 1904, d. Mar 28 1968 ) of Bennettsville, South Carolina on July 3, 1928 ; the couple had three children, Henry Steele Commager Jr., known as Steele Commager, who became an eminent classicist at Columbia University and wrote the leading book on the Roman poet Horace ; Elizabeth Carroll Commager ; and Nellie Thomas McCall Commager ( now Nell Lasch, wife of the historian Christopher Lasch ).

Commager died of pneumonia at the age of ninety-five on March 2, 1998.

Under the influence of his mentor at Chicago, the constitutional historian Andrew C. McLaughlin, Commager shifted his research and teaching interests to American history.

In the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, " In a Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat.

* 1902 – Henry Steele Commager, American historian ( d. 1998 )

Historian Henry Commager wrote that " Even when definitions of terrorism allow for state terrorism, state actions in this area tend to be seen through the prism of war or national self-defense, not terror .” While states may accuse other states of state-sponsored terrorism when they support insurgencies, individuals who accuse their governments of terrorism are seen as radicals, because actions by legitimate governments are not generally seen as illegitimate.

* Commager, Henry Steele and Morris, Richard B., eds.

This classic biography met great critical acclaim, including an assessment by the eminent American historian Henry Steele Commager as " the best biography of Debs.

With his Columbia University colleague Allan Nevins, Commager helped to organize academic support for Adlai E. Stevenson and John F. Kennedy.

Commager insisted, and taught generations of his students, that historians must write not only for one another but for a wider audience.

Commager once said about teaching, " What every college must do is hold up before the young the spectacle of greatness.

This is puzzling to an outsider conscious of the classic tradition of liberalism, because it is clear that these Democrats who are left-of-center are at opposite poles from the liberal Jefferson, who held that the best government was the least government.

And by the time the war ended, liberal leadership in this country was spiritually Marxist.

Another Indiana observer later commented, `` Perhaps we shall never know how much was spent ( by Hearst ), but if as much money was expended elsewhere as in Indiana a liberal fortune was squandered ''.

He was no flaming liberal, yet the New Deal, the Fair Deal and the New Frontier needed him.

It was predicted that Kohnstamm-negative subjects would adhere to more liberal, concretistic reports of what the ambiguous figure `` looked like '' as reflecting their hesitancy about taking chances.

President Truman's Commission on Higher Education tended to take a liberal, expansionist position, while President Eisenhower's Committee on Education Beyond the High School was slightly more conservative.

The line soon lived up to its name, as local messages of moderate length could be sent for a dime and the company was quickly able to declare very liberal dividends on its capital stock.

The insistence of Bienville upon giving liberal prices to the Indians, in order to drive back the Carolina traders, was probably a factor that led to his recall in 1724.

Hence he was in his lifetime, as is the memory of him afterwards, a canker within the liberal sensitivity.

The fact is incontestable: that liberal world of Unitarian Boston was narrow-minded, intellectually sterile, smug, afraid of the logical consequences of its own mild ventures into iconoclasm, and quite prepared to resort to hysterical repressions when its brittle foundations were threatened.

A liberal foreign investment law was approved in June 1994, and a Law on Privatization was adopted in 1997, as well as a program on state property privatization.

The York school was renowned as a centre of learning, in the liberal arts, literature and science as well as in religious matters .< ref name = RenewAmerica >

Ealdred did much to restore discipline in the monasteries and churches under his authority, and was liberal with gifts to the churches of his diocese.

In 1968, UBBTS became a Bible and junior Christian liberal arts college, and in 1970 the name was changed to Atlantic Baptist College ( ABC ).

Ben Adret, with the approval of other prominent Spanish rabbis, sent a letter to the community at Montpellier proposing to forbid the study of philosophy to those who were less than twenty-five years of age, and, in spite of keen opposition from the liberal section, a decree in this sense was issued by Ben Adret in 1305.

When this heresy-decree, to be made effective, was forwarded to other congregations for approval, the friends of liberal thought, under the leadership of the Tibbonites, issued a counter-ban, and the conflict threatened to assume a serious character, as blind party zeal ( this time on the liberal side ) did not shrink from asking the civil powers to intervene.

He was a liberal during the conservative 1950s, only to switch to conservative during the liberal, hippie-era 1960s.

* New Alliance ( Nuova Alleanza ), formerly called Right and Freedom ( Destra e Libertà ), headed by Altero Matteoli and Adolfo Urso, was formed by the staunchest supporters of Gianfranco Fini within the party and supported a liberal political agenda.

The college's mission, the charter stated, was to prepare students " for discharging the Offices of Life with usefulness & reputation " by providing instruction " in the Vernacular and Learned Languages, and in the liberal Arts and Sciences.

The Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition remarks that " At the time it was framed the charter was considered extraordinarily liberal " and that " the government has always been largely non-sectarian in spirit.