I travel the country talking to Americans about the loss of heroes. I point out that New York City’s Hall of Fame for Great Americans attracts only a few thousand visitors a year, while Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame draws over one million.
I describe a 25-foot stained glass window in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, dedicated in the 1920s to four athletes who exemplified good character and sportsmanship, and I offer a quick list of titles of contemporary books on sports: Personal Fouls, on the mistreatment of college athletes; The Courts of Babylon, on the venality of the women’s professional tennis circuit; and Public Heroes, Private Felons, on college athletes who break the law.
I contrast two westerns, High Noon, which won four Academy Awards in 1952, and Unforgiven, which was voted best picture in 1992. The hero of High Noon, Will Kane, is a U.S. marshal. The hero of Unforgiven is a reformed killer and alcoholic reduced to pig farming. High Noon opens in sunshine in the morning with a wedding; Unforgiven opens at night in the rain in a brothel. High Noon starts with a kiss, Unforgiven with copulation. High Noon ends in peace and sunshine with order restored. Unforgiven ends as it opens, in the dark and rain, in sorrow and violence with anarchy ascendant.
I remind my audiences that Thomas Jefferson is now thought of as the President with the slave mistress and Mozart as the careless genius who liked to talk dirty. I add that a recent biography of Mother Teresa is called The Missionary Position.
When I talk to high school students about their heroes, most have no trouble coming up with local heroes: parents, teachers, peers, people they know. Some cite themselves as heroes. Very few come up with past or present artists, writers, scientists, or Presidents. They do bring up Thomas Jefferson and Christopher Columbus, but they talk about these men in terms of DNA and genocide. Raised on revisionist history, they are cynical about America’s past. And some questions are ominous. In Cleveland a boy asks, “Why can’t Hannibal Lecter [the cannibal in Silence of the Lambs] be a hero?” In suburban Philadelphia a sophomore calls my condemnation of Adolf Hitler “just an opinion.” And in San Francisco, a senior tells me, “Heroism is obsolete.”
Signs of heroism’s decline are all around us. On the New Jersey Turnpike there is a rest stop named after disc jockey Howard Stern, who points out that he now joins the company of other great Americans who have rest stops named after them on the Turnpike: Walt Whitman, James Fenimore Cooper, and Woodrow Wilson.
America’s most famous and heroic war photograph shows six haggard Marines jamming an unfurled flag into the rocks of Iwo Jima. Now two historians call it a fraud.
At peace, American civilians no longer look up to soldiers, and Memorial Day becomes just another shopping day. Without the draft, many Americans have no firsthand experience of the military. Relying on the media for information, we come to associate soldiers with scandal. Without enduring basic training, we easily dismiss physical hardship and military courage.
We do have a kind of American hero at the turn of the century: the celebrity. We elevate those who are beautiful, rich, powerful, athletic. We worship the famous. In a visual information age, celebrities not only amuse us; they tell us what to think and how to live. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, celebrities ceased to be just entertainers. They became spokesmen, enlightening us about war, sex, and drugs, and telling us what was wrong with America. Wavering and confused—after race riots, assassinations, Vietnam, and Watergate—we embraced our celebrities as philosophers.
In America we no longer have heroes in common; instead we share shopping, sports, celebrities. We know who wins Academy Awards, Golden Globe Awards, the Heisman Trophy, and Emmy Awards, but not who wins the Carnegie Hero Medal, the Congressional Medal of Honor, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
How did we lose our heroes? A number of elements in our culture have made us skeptical of heroes: Democratic America suspects superiority. Capitalistic America values money and comfort more than nobility. Peace-loving America fears soldiers. Celebrity-worshipping America confuses fame with greatness.
But more important is a confluence of new factors that predispose us to scorn heroism. More powerfully, the media create the impression that sleaze is omnipresent, that no one is noble, that nothing is sacred. Related factors include a sexual revolution that fixates attention on the intimate life; celebrity worship that makes us indifferent to significant achievement; athletes who have given up being role models; and a popular culture that is irreverent and sometimes deviant.
Journalists who have become judgmental, historians who are unforgiving, and biographers who are increasingly hostile are additional enemies of heroism. Time writer and PBS commentator Roger Rosenblatt notes, “My trade of journalism is sodden these days with practitioners who seem incapable of admiring others or anything.” In his memoir, former presidential press secretary Pierre Salinger writes, “No reporter can be famous unless they have brought someone down.”
Revisionist historians believe that American exploits and past leaders long venerated are hopelessly flawed. They mock the notion that great events are caused by outstanding individuals. The radical revisionist magnifies the sins and shortcomings of American history; dwells on inequality and conflict; and insists history is driven forward not by heroes, but by geography, chance, and greed. In Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States—widely used in high schools and colleges—the high points of our nation’s past are Shays’ Rebellion, the Homestead Strike, and the rise of the International Workers of the World. Villains are Christopher Columbus, the Puritans, the Founders, and entrepreneurs.
Our biographers have invented a new genre, “pathography,” in which subjects are sliced and skewered. Pathography emphasizes the mundane, the neurotic, or the sexual; it offers an outlet for resentment and envy, and permits us to be voyeurs. Pathography forgets the glorious achievement and relishes the flawed life. Pathography likes to focus on Jefferson’s love life instead of his writings, his inventions, or the Louisiana Purchase. Albert Einstein’s discoveries now belong to his first wife, and Marie Curie is remembered for an affair.
Paradoxically, some factors that make it hard to have heroes seem benign: peace, affluence, and comfort. It is hard to have heroes without crisis, in the absence of suffering. Finally, in a complex, mysterious way, our culture—mocking and irreverent—does not call forth what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”
Why does an indifference to heroism matter? Because hero is the name given to extraordinary individuals who embody qualities a society finds most admirable. Such people show us the way, energize us, keep us from the darkness. They remind us of how much more we could do, and of how much better we could be. They instruct us in greatness.
By not quitting after the grueling winter at Valley Forge, George Washington teaches us perseverance and endurance. When, after 27 years, Nelson Mandela leaves his South African cell without rancor and invites his guards to his inauguration, we are instructed in magnanimity. When Mother Teresa leaves her comfortable convent school and moves to Calcutta, we learn about compassion. When John McCain spends four years in a North Vietnamese prison and is not broken, we understand valor.
Heroes remind us of our better and braver selves. Shrewdly, George Orwell wrote, “There is one part of you that wants to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin.” When in 1935 Orwell volunteered to fight fascism in Spain, he repudiated comfort and safety.
Heroes, however, are not perfect. They are familiar with doubt and depression. They suffer. They fail. Theodore Roosevelt was not naive. To a friend he wrote, “There is not one among us who does not have the devil in him—it is not having been in the dark house but having left it that counts.” Deliberately, Roosevelt made himself optimistic and brave. Millions of Americans emulated their President. Like High Noon’s Will Kane, heroes instruct us by transcending suffering and triumphing over weakness.
Heroes don’t just offer models and hope. They are fascinating to study. What made Abraham Lincoln rise from poverty and obscurity to become a successful attorney? How did an ambitious lawyer afflicted with doubt and depression become a wise, cunning, and compassionate President? How could he write such memorable prose with no formal education? How did he carry on in the middle of the Civil War when his generals failed and his son died?
After Southerners offered $40,000 for Harriet Tubman’s capture, why did she repeatedly return to Maryland to rescue slaves she did not know? What made Sir Thomas More, in love with life and books and conversation, defy his friend Henry VIII and die for the Catholic Church? Why did Jane Addams found Hull House and help the poor instead of going to health spas and succumbing to depression? Why did the villagers of Le Chambon hide Jews from Germans? We should be interested in the mystery of goodness and greatness.
Until World War I, the ethic of heroism was intact and influential in Anglo-American culture. It permeated parlors, schools, farms, and factories. It could be found in novels, newspapers, and eulogies, in McGuffey’s Readers and in the sermons of Phillips Brooks, on statues everywhere, in inscriptions on public buildings and engraved on tombstones.
The ideology of heroism informed the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. It could be seen in the names parents chose for their children. Nineteenth-century artist Charles Wilson Peale named his sons Rembrandt, Ruben, and Titian. Lafayette named his son after George Washington, as did the parents of Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. After the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, thousands of Americans named their sons Andrew Jackson. After the Crimean War, thousands of British parents named their daughters Florence after Florence Nightingale.
So why heroes? Heroes produce other heroes. Harry Truman was raised on the book Great Men and Famous Women. At age 12, Frederick Douglass purchased for 50 cents one of the most popular books in America at the time, The Columbian Orator. Reciting aloud stirring speeches by Cicero and William Pitt, Douglass discovered both the power of words and models of courage; he also discovered people who thought slavery evil. Until pioneering suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott, she floundered. Before Dorothea Dix heard William Channing preach, she had little interest in moving the mentally ill from prisons to hospitals. Henry David Thoreau wrote ordinary prose until he met Emerson. George Washington might not have given up his sword and returned to his farm if he had not revered the Roman politician Cato.
On the other hand, without heroes the American past loses meaning. If no one is worthy of admiration, why should we aspire? If courage doesn’t exist, why try to be brave? If at bottom we are creatures of appetite and self-interest, why strive to be good? Why be patriotic if America is a failure? If all our heroes are hopelessly flawed, better to stay at home and tend our garden.
In the early part of the twentieth century, popular newscaster and gossip columnist Walter Winchell quipped, “Democracy is where everybody can kick everybody else’s ass.” In America today we revel in bringing down the great, shun talk of virtue, and unashamedly embrace gossip. We have realized Winchell’s dream: Kicking ass has become a national pastime. While our Victorian forebears were perhaps too stuffy and too sentimental, too credulous and too preachy, today the scornful prevail.
I am not suggesting we are like Rome in the fifth century, declining and decadent. I have not forgotten America’s economic, social, and scientific achievements. We have an abundance any emperor of China would envy. Many want to come to America, few wish to leave. Nor do I believe the America of High Noon and the 1950s was perfect. Unforgiven reveals a more complex America: distrustful of gunfighters, suspicious of myths, open about sex, sensitive to victims. But it also reveals a cynical, suspicious America with no one to admire, and a cynical country cannot be great.
It is easy to blame others: politicians who lie to us and let us down, journalists who obliterate privacy and offer only bad news, an intelligentsia that likes to mock, an entertainment industry that thrives on shock. But we are all complicit. We have created a culture that is cynical, sneering, and leering. We have given free rein to envy, to our desire to tarnish and tear down, and shortchanged our instinct to emulate, to look up, to revere.
What can we do? We need to make the case for heroes, to show how they have transformed America and how they can improve our lives. We need to look back and learn from an age when belief in heroism was intact and imitation of the admirable was the norm. At the same time, we need to live in the present and realize that a more mature society requires a complex presentation of heroism, one that includes a recognition of weaknesses and reversals as well as an appreciation of virtues and triumphs. If we have trouble believing in heroic lives, we can at least honor heroic moments.
We need to recognize that an egalitarian, multicultural society requires that the pantheon of heroes be expanded. Immersed in the present, we also need to pay more attention to our past. And we need to remember our soldiers in peacetime and our humanitarians in narcissistic times.
We need to challenge the times and be combative. In a bureaucratic age, celebrate individual achievement. In an egalitarian age, praise genius. When everyone is a victim, stress personal responsibility. In addition to popular culture, high culture. In a society mesmerized by athletes, recall the moral language of sport.
Perhaps most important, we need to teach our children and grandchildren that character is more important than intellect, that wisdom is superior to information, that they can be realistic yet idealistic. And as a society we might recall the words of the German philosopher Goethe: “The way to insight is through good will.”
Page created on 11/21/2005 12:00:00 AM
Last edited 11/21/2005 12:00:00 AM
