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 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.

Commager was a liberal interpreter of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, which he understood as creating a powerful general government that at the same time recognized a wide spectrum of individual rights and liberties.

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

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.

Commager originally studied Danish history, and wrote his Ph. D. dissertation on the Danish philosophe Johann Friedrich Struensee, a major reformer during the Enlightenment.

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

Commager wrote hundreds of essays and opinion pieces on history or presenting a historical perspective on current issues for popular magazines and newspapers.

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

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

* The Cultural Life of the American Colonies, Louis B. Wright, Henry Steele Commager, Brandon Morris, Courier Dover Publications, 2002, pp. vi, vii, 17, 36, 153, 297

* Commager, Henry Steele ; The American Mind ; Chapter 10: Lester Ward and the Science of Society ; Yale University Press ; 1950. http :// books. google. com / books? id = De5sdTFRt5YC & printsec = frontcover & dq = commager + the + american + mind & sig = ACfU3U11MMq0SqETx -- ZijN4Kuqs-4hgkA # v = onepage & q = what % 20sumner % 20did % 20not % 20see & f = false

Holt was a strong proponent of American sovereignty and refused to sign a Declaration of Interdependence that 32 Senators and 92 Representatives signed in 1975, written by historian Henry Steele Commager.

** Alan Brinkley, " The Public Professor " ( A review of " Henry Steele Commager " by Neil Jumonville ), New Republic, September 27, 1999, p. 42.

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, Henry Steele, ed.

* Commager, Henry Steele, ed.

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

At Columbia, Commager mentored a series of distinguished historians who earned their Ph. D. degrees under his tutelage, including Harold Hyman, Leonard W. Levy, and William E. Leuchtenburg.

The historian Henry Steele Commager ranked Ward alongside William James, John Dewey, and Oliver Wendell Holmes and called him the father of the modern welfare state.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

* Henry Steele Commager – Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples, arranged for one volume

* Neil Jumonville, Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999 ) online edition online edition is: http :// mailer. fsu. edu /~ njumonvi / rev-hsc1. htm

** R. B. Bernstein, " Scholarship and Engagement: Henry Steele Commager as Historian and Public Intellectual: Review of Neil Jumonville, Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present ," H-Law, H-Net Reviews, October, 1999. http :// www. h-net. org / reviews / showrev. php? id = 3457

* H-NET review of Neil Jumonville, Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism And The History Of The Present