Essay: ON THE DIFFICULTY OF BEING A CONTEMPORARY HERO

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" 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.