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.”

Quote of the Day (Albert Murray, on the ‘Stress and Strain’ Endured by Heroes)

“Heroism, which like the sword is nothing if not steadfast, is measured in terms of the stress and strain it can endure and the magnitude and complexity of the obstacles it overcomes. Thus difficulties and vicissitudes which beset the potential hero on all sides not only threaten his existence and jeopardize his prospects; they also by bringing out the best in him, serve his purpose. They make it possible for him to make something of himself. Such is the nature of every confrontation in the context of heroic action.” —American literary and jazz critic and novelist Albert Murray (1916-2013), The Hero and the Blues (1973)

Worldwide these past few weeks—and for the foreseeable future here in the U.S.—medical personnel have emerged as the foremost heroes in the battle against the Coronavirus. 

A fictional forebear of this brave group was the title character of Sinclair Lewis’ 1925 novel Arrowsmith, adapted into a movie six years later starring Ronald Colman (pictured here). The climax of the novel and film is this young doctor’s battle against the plague on a fictional Caribbean island.

Lewis’ dogged pursuit of fact—and deeply realistic depiction of his hero’s life—led to the novelist being rewarded with the Pulitzer Prize. Someday, when our current crisis is over, perhaps another author will deliver a similar masterful account of a field that needs desperately to be better understood.

Quote of the Day (Bernard Malamud, on His Attitude Toward Heroes)

"I have not given up on heroes. I simply use heroic qualities in small men."—American short-story writer and novelist Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), quoted in Philip Davis, Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life (2007)

Quote of the Day (Pericles, on Heroes)

“Heroes have the whole earth for their tomb.”—Athenian statesman and general Pericles (494 BC-429 BC), “Pericles’ Funeral Oration,” in Thucydides (460 BC-395 BC), The History of the Peloponnesian War  

(The image accompanying this post, Pericles’ Funeral Oration, was created by German painter Philipp Foltz.)
Heroes