The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

When drafting the document Commager was assisted by an "Advisory Committee" including Raymond Aron Herbert Agar Leonard Woodcock Archibald MacLeish and others. 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. On July 14 1979 he married his second wife the former Mary Powlesland a professor in Latin American studies in Linton England.

Later in his career he opposed the war in Vietnam and was an articulate and energetic critic of Presidents Lyndon B. His principal scholarly works were his 1936 biography of Theodore Parker; his intellectual history The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s (1950) which focuses on the evolution of liberalism in the American political mind from the 1880s to the 1940s; and his intellectual history Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (1977).