Henry Steele Commager disappointed the people who came last night to hear him praise or condemn present American life in a talk titled "Was America a Mistake?"

The subject turned out to be the eighteenth century controversy between America's Old World revilers and her New World defenders.

Commager, an American historian now on the faculty at Amherst College, explored American attempts to refute the French philosophes--who maintained that nature in the New World was degenerate, that the animals were undersized, that the natives were undersexed, and that Europe might be corrupted.

Stepping deftly from the example of Jefferson--who responded to this libel by sending one of the learned French gentlemen a stuffed black panther and a live moose--to the more general case, Commager suggested some of the effects of the fray for American history.

Americans were led to see their country as distinctly different, environmentally, from Europe. They pioneered in practical scientific study, and found that their nature was better, their people grew bigger, and their population grew faster, Commager said.

And they also came to a new idea of progress: left alone, America could solve all the problems that Europe never could. They found that the New World was not worse but better, he added.