“An age without great men is one which acquiesces in
the drift of history. Such acquiescence is easy and seductive; the great appeal
of fatalism, indeed, is as a refuge from the terror of responsibility. Where a
belief in great men insistently reminds us that individuals can make a
difference, fatalism reassures us that they can’t. It thereby blesses our
weakness and extenuates our failure.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007), “The Decline of Heroes,” The
Saturday Evening Post, Nov. 1, 1958
When I came across this essay in a nearly 50-year-old
high school textbook, I couldn’t help but ponder how it applied to the current
situation. While mourning the absence of figures like the Allied leaders in
WWII, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. simply couldn’t conceive of a day when a statue of
one of those titans, Winston Churchill, would be vandalized in England—nor that
a wave of such icon-smashing would occur across the Atlantic, in the United
States.
Yet that was hardly the least of the ironies in this
piece:
*In decrying the lack of “great men” at the time he
was writing (toward the end of the Eisenhower administration), Schlesinger may
well have been thinking literally of a single sex—none of the major figures he
cited were female.
*Schlesinger did not foresee that, only two years
after writing this article, he would support a Presidential candidate whose
tragically shortened “thousand days” in the Oval Office would make him the
dominant personality of the Sixties: John F. Kennedy.
*While noting that “historical fatalism” and a
collectivist, homogeneous society had undermined the yearning for heroes,
Schlesinger did not anticipate two forces that would diminish that instinct
even more rapidly today: historical revisionism and multiculturalism. The
civil-rights movement, still in an early stage, had only just begun to move
historians towards reinterpreting the Civil War and Reconstruction as well as
the individuals who dominated those eras. It would take another three decades
before Schlesinger—a former national chair of the liberal political
organization Americans for Democratic Action—would come to regard
multiculturalism’s impact on the teaching of history with mounting misgivings
in The Disuniting of America (1991).
In one instance, Schlesinger, having come of age
during the rise of fascism abroad, sensed the danger of a dominant figure in
the White House, one who knew how to exploit the resentments of the common man:
“To say that there is a case for heroes is not to say
that there is a case for hero worship. The surrender of decision, the
unquestioning submission to leadership, the prostration of the average man
before the Great Man — these are the diseases of heroism, and they are fatal to
human dignity.”
No comments:
Post a Comment