Paths of Glory

In 1898, long before polls became a national preoccupation, an inquisitive schoolteacher named Estelle M. Darrah decided to find out what sort of heroes & heroines children had. She polled 1,440 youngsters, aged 12 to 14. Last week, after finishing a similar survey of his own, Professor Lawrence A. Averill of Worcester (Mass.) State Teachers College reported in School and Society how times and heroes have changed.

In Miss Darrah's day, 90% of the children in the survey picked their heroes from history and letters. Washington and Lincoln led the list, followed by John Greenleaf Whittier, Clara Barton, Julius Caesar, Christopher Columbus. Few of them gave first place to living notables; even such national characters as Champion Skater John S. Johnson and Heavyweight James J. Corbett rated only a handful of votes.

Today's teen-agers turned out to be less impressed by the past than by the present. Only 33% of them picked their heroes & heroines from history. (Franklin Roosevelt had passed Washington and Lincoln in this department, though Clara Barton still led among girls.) The real bandwagon movement (37% of the votes) is to contemporary stars of screen, sport, radio and the comics, Averill found. Tops among the heroes in these fields: Outfielder Ted Williams, Hollywood's Gene Autry, Esther Williams and Betty Grable, the comic-strip hero Joe Palooka.

"It is a rather significant commentary," concluded the professor, "that four times as many boys chose as their hero Gene Autry as chose Jesus Christ; that as many chose Jack Benny as chose priests, ministers, and missionaries combined . . . and that, among the girls, twice as many wish to be like Shirley Temple or Jane Powell as wish to be like all religious figures combined."

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