Quote of the Day (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., on an Age Without Heroes)

“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.”