ON THE DIFFICULTY OF BEING A CONTEMPORARY HERO

" A HERO cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world," /V observed Nathaniel Hawthorne, who thought even in 1850 that America's world had turned unheroic. Thomas Carlyle felt that "Ballot-boxes and Electoral suffrages" might prove a fatal threat to heroes. Americans today find heroism daily in Viet Nam and high courage in a thousand situations, from space to civil rights. And yet there is a widespread feeling that the leap of imagination that makes heroes and the generosity of spirit that acknowledges them are disappearing. Can there be real heroes in a time of the computer and the committee decision?

In the heyday of the hero, history was a game with few players, and a single man could more readily change it all. The Greeks were losing the Trojan war until Achilles was coaxed from his tent. Horatius defended Rome's bridge with only two friends, and even as late as 1528, Pizarro could overthrow the mighty Inca civilization with only 167 men --less than the number commanded by Captain William Carpenter in that recent local battle in Viet Nam. Now with a cast of many thousands or millions, each leader heads only a segment, and decision is often a synthesis of the opinions of many herolings. Where there are too many heroes, there may be none in the end, for the essence of heroism is singularity. Lindbergh is perhaps the greatest of all American heroes, a machine-borne Icarus who did not fall. The astronauts are his heirs and yet they are already submerged in team heroism. First there was Alan Shepard, who was succeeded by the engaging John Glenn, and then Edward White was the first American to walk in space, and then ... By now few people can remember all the names. But the astronaut remains truly heroic as a composite figure.

Magic & Decline

The classic heroes, in the words of U.C.L.A.'s late Historian Dixon Wecter, "were taller by a head than any of their tribesmen, could cut iron with their swords, throw the bar farther or wind the horn louder than their fellows--Achilles and Ulysses, Siegfried and Roland, Beowulf and Richard the Lionhearted." Their latter-day American equivalents might be Douglas MacArthur, reconquering the Pacific, true to his vow, "I shall return," and Ike Eisenhower, commanding the massed D-day armies or winning his sweeping 1952 election victory. But it is difficult to imagine Beowulf getting only ten nominating votes as Republican candidate for President (which is what happened to MacArthur), or Roland trying to govern with benign passivity (which is what Ike did during much of his White House tenure).

With modern communications, mythmaking, which is essential to heromaking, is far more difficult. The democratic press exposes leaders to a relentless scrutiny that no putative hero of the past had to survive. Alexander the Great was able to achieve hero status by his own declaration that he was descended from Zeus, and his far-off conquests were known to Macedonian peasants only by a crying in the market--the more magical because it was imprecise. If he slapped a soldier in the face or picked up a beagle by the ears, they might never have known.

The hero's metaphysical underpinnings have been giving way for centuries. Professor George M. Harper of the University of North Carolina points out that "the Greek and Shakespearean concept of the hero as an essentially noble man created in the image of his Creator and sharing his attributes is no longer possible." The decline began, Harper suggests, with Copernicus and Galileo, who demonstrated that the earth was not the center of the universe and that man is therefore not the center of creation. Darwin described man as a pawn of evolution, Freud as a puppet of the unconscious, Marx and other determinists as a prisoner of an abstraction called history. "Show our critics a great man, a Luther for example," complained Carlyle. "He was the 'creature of the Time,' they say; the Time called him forth, the Time did everything, he nothing."

In recent decades, talk of heroes seemed to carry overtones of tyranny, of Nazism's "supermen." In socialist mythology, the masses, not the individual, were regarded as heroic. In literature, the non-hero took over. He thrives in the U.S. today in the hands of such writers as Saul Bellow--whose Herzog has his great moment at the end of the book when he manages to summon enough strength to tell his cleaning woman to sweep the kitchen. Other literary "heroes" are fall guys, incipient madmen, badgered Everymen, victims. Their motto, says Daniel Aaron, professor of English at Smith, seems to be, "Call me schlemiel." In more mundane life, there is much revulsion against the pose, if not the reality, of heroism. "Ya wanna be a hero?" is a mockery, not a compliment.

In spite of all that, the U.S. still has its heroes--though they are different from those of any other society.

There is today no agreed definition of what a hero is. Philosopher Sidney Hook defines a hero as an "eventmaking" man who changes history, like Churchill or Lenin, as distinct from the merely "eventful" man, like Lyndon Johnson (so far) or Charles de Gaulle. "De Gaulle would be an eventmaking man," says Hook, "if he had the power." Yet there are many heroes who did not change events, or who had heroism thrust upon them through accident.

Another valid definition of a hero is "a person regarded as a model." In The Natural, Novelist Bernard Malamud has one character explain: "Without heroes we're all plain people and don't know how far we can go. . . It's their function to be the best." But excellence is not enough to make a hero, nor is willingness to challenge the odds; those qualities may merely add up to leadership. "Heroism should not be confused with strength and success," says Author John Updike. "Our concept of the hero must be humanized to include the ideas of sacrifice and death, even of failure." The hero also must touch people's emotions. In modern jargon, that means someone who "turns people on."

Soldiers & Champions

U.S. Presidents should be hero material, but not too many have turned people on. America's most unequivocal hero, if somewhat dutifully admired, is George-Washington, who has the built-in title of father of his country. Far more beloved is Lincoln--perhaps because he was ugly, because he was born poor, because he was funny, but most of all because he carried doubts and uncertainties in the lines of his face but still was able to make great decisions.

Beyond these, the U.S. has been sparing in awarding even part-time hero status to its Presidents. Andrew Jackson probably makes it, though more because he was Old Hickory "who brought the people into the White House" than because he was the victor of New Orleans. Teddy Roosevelt may have changed the course of human events less significantly than Woodrow Wilson, who led the U.S. into World War I. But Teddy's robust vigor captured the American imagination, while there lingered about Wilson, even in his martyrdom, a distressing air of the austere schoolmaster.

With increasing sophistication, Americans no longer seem impressed with a born-in-a-log-cabin background. Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy were born to wealth and flaunted shamelessly expensive tastes (while no one was much interested in Nixon's poorboy origin). Roosevelt demonstrated a characteristic of the classic hero, who, according to Historian Wecter, "envisages his era as a crisis, a drama of good versus evil, and himself as the man of destiny. In a sense, he must be a hero to himself before he can command that worship in others." Kennedy's record is mixed, and the assassin's bullet cut it short before it was completed. But he, too, was a hero to himself. Visibly and with eloquence, he embodied the hope of a new start. His looks and his style, the glamour of his wife and his clan permanently enshrined him as the most romantic of U.S. Presidents.

It says something about the national character that Americans have always had only tempered admiration for the men of strictly military exploits. John Paul Jones and Farragut rise from the history books as authors of heroic slogans, but hardly as full-fledged heroes. Besides, there is a strong prejudice in favor of the gallant loser and the persistent defender of a lost cause. Lee and Stonewall Jackson outrank Ulysses S. Grant. World War I produced no military heroes unless it was Sergeant York, a man of peace reacting to pressure. World War II and after showed a growing sophistication in American taste in war heroes. The dashing George Patton was ranked well behind the judicious men of wide responsibility such as Eisenhower, Bradley, Marshall.

Heroes are not only soldiers, but champions of political causes. Among the most conspicuous champions today are the fighters for civil rights, and perhaps posterity will find a degree of heroism in that quiet man, Earl Warren, who wrote the historic decision striking down separate-but-equal education. But heroism requires panache, which makes Martin Luther King a more vivid current hero.

Saints & Knights

American hero worship is not necessarily nationalistic. Most Americans acknowledge Churchill as one of their greatest heroes, not only because he forged blood, toil, tears and sweat into victory, but because he seemed to embody, like a noble caricature, all the legendary qualities of the English. Not that pugnacity is essential. Americans see Pope John XXIII as a hero because he exuded love and managed to combine the saintly with the jolly. Many Americans would also accord the status of saint-hero to Albert Schweitzer, because they cherish the sentimental picture of the man who gave up the world in order to do good works in a dark corner of the globe. But Schweitzer perhaps lived too long. "Every hero becomes a bore at last," said Emerson.

In another context, giving up the world is an achievement to which Americans are profoundly drawn. All the great Western heroes from Daniel Boone on are revered and envied not merely for physical prowess but for attaining a free life, unfettered by civilization's rules. Today, the hero must find his niche very much inside civilization, and he will probably belong to the ranks of the specialist heroes. No intellectual can be a hero to those who don't read (except in France), nor any baseball player to a man who never goes to a game. But they have a common denominator--they expand the sense of human capability.

Athletes have traditionally been heroes in the human imagination. Men still dream of themselves as Samson, tearing down the temple around the mocking ears, or as Lancelot, cutting down all challengers and incidentally winning the lady. But the commercialization of athletics and pervasive publicity have altered the image of the "parfit knight."

Babe Ruth survived as a hero largely because his young admirers never realized that his private life was pretty disheveled. Today's sports hero is more widely known, but loses glamour when seen combing greasy kid stuff out of his hair. Americans like their heroes earthy, whether it is Ted Williams or Casey Stengel--but he must not be too loutish. Jackie Robinson is elected because he displayed grace under the pressure of breaking the color bar in baseball. Still, the arena is crowded; so many good athletes are on view that heroes, as distinct from mere record breakers, are scarce.

The U.S.'s newest heroes are scientists. Though inventors such as Eli Whitney, Edison or Bell have long been acknowledged, only Einstein among the pure scientists held a place in the U.S. consciousness until World War II. Today the roster would be long, studded with such names as Teller, Oppenheimer and Waksman. Another set of latter-day heroes are physicians, whose list would include Drs. Fleming, DeBakey, Salk and Paul Dudley White. Among businessmen, only Henry Ford has achieved anything like heroic dimensions, although such magnates as Astor and Carnegie were heroes to their day. The values of commerce, no matter how much they may accomplish, are the antithesis of the traditional values of glory.

Does the U.S. need heroes? Not in the sense of the man on the white horse who will take care of everything. To the uncertain, sheer conviction--right or wrong--is a kind of relief. This is what makes "heroes" out of the Hitlers, the Stalins, and even the Joe McCarthys. Adlai Stevenson, who is a hero of the intellectuals, knew the difference. Reaching back to Cicero in comparing himself to Jack Kennedy, he noted ruefully, "When Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, 'How well he spoke'--but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, 'Let us march.' " Heroes may be wrong, but they must be sure.

Even the U.S.'s most sacrosanct heroes have a relation to American life that is not quite equivalent to other nations' heroes. Britain's Wellington, France's Napoleon, Russia's Peter the Great are national heroes, who specifically did something for the greater glory of the nation and can be claimed by no other country. But the U.S.'s Washington and Lincoln, Wilson and Kennedy are celebrated for the ideals they championed. They reaffirm the American idea of itself as a nation dedicated not to power but to ideals. In that sense, the U.S. needs heroes more than ever.

One sign of the need comes from the young who are indeed looking for heroes. The seriousness of the search is only underlined by the weird pseudo heroes whom some have discovered, ranging from Bob Dylan, the long-playing minstrel of social protest, to the Beatles, who demonstrated a way to shock their elders and still be innocent.

The need for heroes is also seen in the widespread rejection of the literary antihero. He is kept alive only because "people who can't manage their own lives identify with him," says Joseph Campbell, professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence. The antihero, suggests Campbell, is a disease of New York, "a city which is a psychological calamity and which has no connection with the land America." In a very real way, the land America prefers Humphrey Bogart and James Bond. Bogart demonstrates the belief that a man can be tough but tender, ugly but sexy. The Bond syndrome suggests a yearning for the old-fashioned action hero, free from conventional fetters. Says Sociologist Marshall Fishwick of the University of Delaware: "The playboy is a cowboy who has just discovered woman."

Advice & Consent

On the personal level, there may be a distaste for "getting involved," and the story of people standing by passively while someone is being beaten up has become almost a newspaper cliche. But for every such incident, there are a series of uncelebrated acts of bravery performed to help others or to defend the right. Psychiatrists are apt to point out that such spontaneous heroes may be motivated only by suppressed anxiety or a desire for violent action. The soldier who flings himself on a grenade is simply reacting to a "subconscious impulse toward self-destruction" or because "identification with the group supersedes his own ego." It seems a singularly graceless way of defining an impulse that still stirs human hearts: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

The ultimate hero is the democratic process itself, which is bigger than any individual. This may cut down heroes. But it can also inspire an increment of effort that can make a hero out of many a man who was born in obscurity and never suspected his own strength.

It is a process that also gives American heroism, once achieved, a special status. For despite the glib techniques of image-building, the American chooses his heroes only in a final stubbornness of spirit that resists campaign posters, opinion polls, or cocktail harangues. It is an act that differentiates Americans from other people in other times, who may have felt that their heroes had already become heroes without consultation. The American has a sense of electing his own heroes--a vote freely given that can also be freely withdrawn. Without advice and consent, there are no heroes.

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