A Note on American Heroes
by Donald Davidson
A pertinent essay for our times.
Originally published in the Southern Review, 1935 (Also a chapter in The Attack on Leviathan)
Back in the nineteen-twenties Mr. H. L. Mencken was asked—not perhaps by a genial admirer—why, if the American scene was so much to his distaste, he felt obliged to inhabit it. His answer was curt and in the temper then prevailing. Why, said Mr. Mencken, does one go to a circus? From this, the disgusted or unheroical view, we are now far removed. A generation of biographers, historians, folklorists, regionalists, and historical novelists have instructed us in the abundant goodness of the American life of the past. Whatever else we lack, we do not lack great memories. We have heroes, and we want to possess them affectionately as a mature nation ought.
Yet on this as on many other matters our minds are divided. We are not sure on what terms we may possess our heroes. The machinery of the heroic legend is all there, for poets and orators to use, but our approach to it is often hesitating and embarrassed; or else, in the old way of Americans, we hide our lack of self-confidence in bluster, and are entirely too positive.
This division of mind was never better illustrated than in Mr. Burton J. Hendrick's recent book, The Lees of Virginia. It is of course a fine specimen of the devotion of the amateur or lay historian to the task of interpreting the American past, and as such invites special remark. But that is not my reason for referring to it. It serves as a text in this connection because Mr. Hendrick has gone to unusual lengths in setting forth his attitude toward his work. In his "Introduction," after some reference to the great importance of the old Virginia families, he says, "The history of one of these tribes should have at least antiquarian interest." And a little further on we come upon this passage: The type of society and public life they represented has gone and gone forever. Probably there was not much in its essential manifestations that the present generation would care to resurrect ... Only a rash soul would picture this old Virginia, with its great plantations, its slaves, its upper class, full of snobbishness and of social oppression, its less fortunate stratum of whites, as superior to the present era. But the mere fact that such an order once held sway in this country and wrought great things for their descendants is interesting. It forms a humane and charming episode in the nation's annals—a kind of quiet interlude in the rushing progress of American life.
In other words, after writing a magnificent book, which may tend to make the reader worshipful, Mr. Hendrick enters a cold disclaimer, and assures him that he need not, or must not, be worshipful at all, for the figures he has reanimated really have no meaning except as charming antiquarian curiosities. There may be several reasons for this disclaimer—among them, perhaps, a determinist theory of history, or some condescension toward the share of the South in "the rushing progress of American life."
There is another possible reason. Mr. Hendrick has the retrospective impulse, but he fears and distrusts it. He restores to us a magnificent set of heroes, but he does not want to be caught in the act of creating a heroic legend. So he hastens to assure us that he has no really serious intentions. The Lee legend, although it has a historic basis, does not fit into any rationale that he can accept. If it has no rational existence, Mr. Hendrick cannot permit it any other sort of valid existence. Whatever cannot be explained, or whatever confuses the neatly arranged scheme of the present, must be stigmatized as "antiquarian." That is, it is myth, or near to being myth. And being myth it is inutile and inferior.
This is an American disease which has afflicted more than one biographer and many a poet. It is in fact a modern disease, which Mr. I. A. Richards has attempted to describe on the poetic side. Mr. John Crowe Ransom, in God Without Thunder, deals with the religious side chiefly, but his words may be used to describe Mr. Hendrick's state of mind when he reduces the Lee legend to an inferior status: Myths are construed very simply by the hard Occidental mind: they are lies. It is supposed that everything that is written in serious prose ought to be historical or scientific; that is, devoted either to authenticated facts or to generalizations about these facts. Myths, like fairy tales, like poems, are neither. They are therefore absurd. We are given to understand that their effectiveness can be only with some simple and primitive population, that they are not nearly good enough for the men of our twentieth century generation, brought up in the climatic blessedness of our scientific Occident.
It seems clear that if the interpretation of the past is to be carried on in Mr. Hendrick's temper, the good it will do us will be questionable. We shall doubt whether our heroes are to be accepted, no matter how heroic they appear to be, because we cannot fit them into the rational scheme to which we are committed. If those are the terms on which the gallery of American national heroes is to be established, we shall never have any such heroes. Men have never found it easy to agree within the rational plane, and Americans will never be at peace with their heroes if they have the additional perplexity of being forced to choose between ideas and emotions, with no privilege of combination allowed. This predicament might well form the subject matter of a book like Mr. Ransom's, with a title to parallel his, such as Heroes Without Glory. The material for it could be obtained from such books as Mr. Hendrick's or from a type of book greatly inferior to his, generally known as the "debunking" biography, which assures us that the noble severity of George Washington's countenance ought to be attributed to his discomfort in wearing false teeth, or that John Hancock was a notorious smuggler.
Yet, returning to Mr. Hendrick as my example, I find that the end of his book does not agree with the beginning, and in not so agreeing, it illustrates another part of the divided mind that American writers exhibit toward American heroes. Mr. Hendrick, after all, is so excited by the Lee myth that he would like to incorporate it in another myth which, despite his disclaimer, is actively at work in his mind and has a respectable status.
After giving a sketch of General Robert E. Lee—which happens to be done with somewhat less gusto and understanding than his studies of the earlier Lees—he reports once more that the influence of the Lees is "gone forever." They have yielded to a changed America: The desolate aspect of the Potomac shore [he writes] manifests this change. One can search the region where the first Richard Lee assembled his plantations and find almost no trace of the ancient day. . . But a new fact, emblematic of a new time, has been reserved for Arlington, where the last of the great Lees fixed his home. It is now a national shrine—the house a Lee museum, the surrounding country the burial place of Federal soldiers and sailors, one section set aside as grave and monument for the Unknown Soldier in the World War. As one stands on the porch, the object mainly in view is the Lincoln Memorial, joined physically and spiritually to the home of Robert E. Lee by the beautiful new bridge across the river.
The vocabulary and the tone are here no longer matter-of-fact, as in the introduction. The desolate aspect of the Potomac shore becomes a poetic symbol. We encounter metaphorical terms: emblematic, shrine, spiritually. The conjunction of Arlington and the Lincoln Memorial, joined by the "beautiful new bridge," is brought into rich symbolic contrast with the desolate Potomac.
Evidently Mr. Hendrick is a devout believer in the Lincoln myth, which for him is sublimated into a national myth. Involuntarily, quite without realizing what he is doing, he recognizes the power and dignity of the hostile Southern myth, and he would dispose of it by absorbing it and declining to treat it as hostile. In so doing he ceases to write history; he becomes a myth-maker. The action is very instructive. For while Mr. Hendrick has earlier gone on record as a thorough Modernist in his attitude toward myth, he would exempt his own myth, the Lincoln myth, and be strongly Fundamentalist toward it. It is as if a Mohammedan should argue against the deity of Jesus on the ground that the Virgin Birth is a logically untenable and "antiquarian" idea, and then turn around and accept Jesus if Christians will call Him a Moslem.
If now a Southerner—whose mind may also be divided, yet is likely to be less grievously divided than Mr. Hendrick's—should turn this historian's weapons upon him, the argument would run like this. On purely matter-of-fact grounds, what prevents the Lincoln myth from being regarded as also a charming, antiquarian interlude? The Lincoln idea, too, has had to yield to a changed America and may be gone forever. The Union that Lincoln is said to have wanted to reestablish was never really set up. If Lincoln was a supporter, as in a dim way he may have been, of the Jeffersonian notion of a body of free and self-reliant farmers as the bulwark of the nation, then why did he fight the South? Lincoln made war upon his own idea, and the fruit of his victory, represented in sprawling, confused, industrial America, is a more pitiful sight than the desolate Lee plantations, for it is hardly even a noble ruin. However effective it may have been as a war measure, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was an inept bit of civil statesmanship, for it put the Negro problem beyond the hope of any such solution as America has been able to use for the Indian problem. By letting himself be used as the idealistic front for the material designs of the North, Lincoln not only ruined the South but quite conceivably ruined the North as well; and if fascism or communism ever arrive in America, Lincoln will have been a remote but efficient cause of their appearance.
Thus a Southerner might argue if he copied Mr. Hendrick and brought Modernist dialectic to bear on his cherished myth. Then with kindling emotion the Southerner might go on, prompted to declare where his own myth is invaded, and add that nothing could be more ironic, or perhaps more tragic, than to have Arlington made into a "national shrine," or to have the Lincoln Memorial "the object mainly in view" from the porch where Robert E. Lee once stood. Lee never reentered Arlington after he left it in 1861 to take command of the state troops of Virginia. His wife, a daughter of the adopted son of Washington, had to flee hurriedly from the mansion at the outbreak of hostilities. She was unable to carry with her the Washington heirlooms which formed a cherished part of the Lee possessions. These were respected by General McDowell, the first Federal invader of Virginia, but a little later the building was looted, and the Washington relics were stolen and hawked about the city of Washington, to be forever dispersed. If any gesture of courtesy emanated from Lincoln to mitigate these asperities, the Southerner has not heard of it; but Lincoln in viewing Southern secession as insurrection, put upon Lee the stigma of "traitor." And by what sort of an act, too, did Arlington pass into the hands of the Federal government in the first place?
As the Southerner reflects on these matters, his indignation is likely to rise to a point where he cannot with any comfort visit the old mansion of Arlington. In no case will he be likely to agree that the beautiful new bridge joins Lee and Lincoln in "spiritual" union. He may possibly consider the near presence of the Lincoln Memorial an affront which must be tolerated but cannot be enjoyed. To the sons of Confederates it is a reminder of tragedy, not an emblem of exaltation. If the people of Illinois wish to erect a memorial to Lincoln in Springfield, that is entirely proper. But why should the Southerner be called on to respect as a "national" symbol, the great image of Lincoln in the attitude of a brooding god-Lincoln, who did not receive a Southern vote in 1860; who was never president of the Southern states; who was, alas, though with some healing kindness toward the end, a destroying angel to them. Whatever intellectual admiration the Southerner may have for Lincoln the great man—and he may have such an admiration—he will find himself unresponsive, if he retains the traditional Southern feeling in this matter, to the appeal of Lincoln as national hero.
The situation illustrates at its most painful and difficult point the embarrassment we are under in our wish to possess national heroes. We do not agree as to what is national and what is heroic. We cannot get the intellectual and the emotional element ideally united in the single figure who will stand for what all Americans desire. The agreement is hardest to obtain in reference to the period when Americans were most bitterly divided: Secession, War, and Reconstruction. We come nearest to obtaining it in our attitude toward the heroes of the Revolution and the early Republic. But even in this field of closest agreement, we hesitate and begin to make exceptions. George Washington grows ever more faint and far away for most Americans as the image of Washington built in the homely glorification of the Parson Weems tradition is dissected and cast aside, and as the man Washington, an eighteenth century gentleman farmer, with a little of the frontier and a great deal of the Southern plantation in him, is more and more insisted upon by the historian. Besides, Washington in his national aspect represents the difficult Federal conception at a time when it was really Federal, not "consolidated." We have progressed or degenerated from a time when a man could be Father of his country to a time when we are the Babies of the state. We have lately freshened our knowledge of Washington, but it cannot be said that we have thereby quickened our feeling for him as a hero. The urban intelligentsia of the East, the immigrant masses in metropolitan centres, the Hollywood producers, the worshippers in Aimee Semple MacPherson's temple—all these can know Washington, conceivably, in a book, as they can know Gustavus Adolphus or the Gracchi. That does not necessarily mean that they can connect Washington with a national ideal.
Mr. Herbert Agar may be right in holding, in his Land of the Free, that Jefferson has fared better in American respect than Washington, in the sense that he is a living symbol. Possibly Jefferson incarnates the basic democratic idea which every American feels obliged either to reverence or to seem not to violate. The Democratic Party still professes to be Jeffersonian. The Republican Party in its origin took the old name of Jefferson's party and at the outset pretended to Jeffersonian tenets. Yet it would not be far from the truth to say that the founding fathers, and Jefferson with them, are becoming more and more figures in the book, understandable enough there, but hardly to be conceived as appearing like a Theseus to aid us against the Persians of some national crisis. We have no sense of their personal presence, although we do sedulously preserve the houses they lived in and the beds they slept in, and pause to stare a moment, in wistfulness or boredom, before we finger the map that will direct us on our four or five hundred miles per day. We no longer name children, places, institutions, for them, but do occasionally use their names for things that least represent them-like hotels. Of not many counties in the United States can it be said, as it is still said of certain counties in the Old Southwest, that “they are still voting for Andrew Jackson.”
With Jackson the focus becomes sectional again, but the line divides East and West rather than North and South. Whether in Massachusetts or Virginia, the opinion is the same, and is about to this general effect: Andrew Jackson was a quarrelsome rough-neck. But west of the mountains admiration still flourishes, though perhaps in diminishing ratio as one moves west of north.
On either side of the Ohio River, the existing portrait of Andrew Jackson—whether one runs upon it in an antique shop or in some Western mind—is a portrait of the Hero of New Orleans, magnificently erect on horseback while Pakenham's bombs burst in vain. Andrew Jackson represents the Western idea of the American national tradition, which is “to be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell.” There is not enough decorum in this principle to suit the East, but the West has adhered to the tradition. Its heroes are men of direct action. They always assume the shape of the Man on Horseback who will ride roughshod to triumph. There is a direct link between Jackson's “Smash the Bank,” Bryan's “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold,” and Senator Huey Long's “Share the Wealth” plan. But the East just as consistently declines to admit the Western hero to the national role. It laughs at the Andrew Jacksons of the West, it patronizes or snubs them, and, if they grow powerful, it raises the cry of "demagogue" and trembles for the res publica. The West retaliates by a complete insensitivity to the leadership of the Adams family. In more recent times (aside from a disagreement in matters of religion and prohibition) the West could not see what the East saw of the heroic in Al Smith.
To this tendency there are exceptions. The Lincoln myth is a notable one. The East accepts Lincoln, but one cannot help realizing what a convenient acceptance it has been. For the East the prevalence of the Lincoln myth has meant the comfortable assurance of power long continued. There is a tacit bargain implied: we take your hero if you take our program. On the other hand, when the West, with a little less design, has accepted an Eastern hero, he is likely to be a Roosevelt, a man with some Western ebullience in him that serves him none too well in his home section.
The line between East and West cuts nothing like so deep as the line between North and South. No inappropriateness is felt in setting up splendid memorials in New York City to Grant and Sherman, who though they originated no further west than Ohio, still belong to the Western, not the Eastern tradition. It is safe to say, too, that the West will not raise any great clamor against certain figures in Borglum's great sculptures for the Black Hills monument merely on the ground that they are Eastern figures. But Sherman will not soon be memorialized in Georgia. The proposal that his route to the sea be indicated by markers was scornfully rejected by the Deep South. John Brown may be memorialized both in Connecticut and Kansas, but who dares to propose that his name be honored south of the Mason and Dixon line? The Federal Treasury, under a Republican administration, approved the issue of the Stone Mountain half-dollar to help raise funds for a great Confederate monument; but no Northern figure will appear on that memorial if it is ever completed. The plan to erect a joint monument to Grant and Lee on the scene of the Appomattox surrender had to be abandoned. Although the money had already been set aside by Congress and the design approved, urgent Southern protests intervened, and perhaps suggested to the sponsors that the monument, if erected, might not stay erected.
We are very little better off when we step outside the period of controversy and war. Outside of the East, Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain boys are hardly more than hearsay. John Sevier and the King's Mountain patriots belong to the regional Valhalla of a few Southern states; Maine and Oregon do not celebrate their names. Sam Houston in his time was a "national" figure, but he would not be well remembered today if he were not dear to Texan and Southwestern tradition. A Louisianian, arriving in Albany, New York, will hardly know for whom the DeWitt Clinton hotel was named. The upstate New Yorker is no more likely to know for whom Fort Sumter was named. The frontier West might fare better on a test of this sort. Few Americans are likely to miss the significance of Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill, and Custer. But here we begin to deal with types rather than individuals and approach the borderland of true folk-myth, wherein a legendary, rather than a historical, Daniel Boone, becomes a general national figure, as unassailable as Washington and much better visualized.
In the realm of historical heroics, where the will to believe is forever locked in hard wrestle with the will to disbelieve, the line of ascent to the status of American national hero would seem to be from local to sectional to national. If an American hero does not attain to sectional status, he has little chance of becoming a national hero. And yet, paradoxically, the more richly sectional he is, the less chance he has to become a truly national hero. Is there a practical law of American heroics, which could be stated as follows: To be an American hero, a man must be a sectional hero; but no true sectional hero can be a true, or complete, national hero.
One does not need to indulge in mysticism—certainly not in the kind of mysticism that enables Mr. Waldo Frank to discover Swedenborgian essences oozing from the geography and history of the United States—in order to see a principle of equilibrium involved here, somewhat like the conception embodied in our Federal constitution. Theoretically, the only kind of really national hero we can have ought to be a hero who embodies the Federal conception. But that sphere is too abstract for a hero to thrive in it. Heroics there are dangerous to the principle of equilibrium which is vital to the American conception of the nation. The Federal sphere will accommodate the statesman, but not the hero, in the epical and tremendous sense. For that reason it may be that Americans have turned instinctively, during the latter part of their history, to presidents who were distinguished but not too distinguished. On the other hand, the sections, which embody culturally related groups of states and have approximate unity of feeling, are the true home of the particular and definite characteristics out of which arises the grand type, the hero. The sections, and within them the localities, are the true mothers of heroes, and our problem is how to venerate our heroes without disturbing the national equilibrium.
In practical affairs the problem is generally handled by a technique of compromise. Party leaders recognize the overwhelming importance of sectional predisposition. For presidential candidate they will choose a man who has enough sectional appeal to carry his own section, but not so much sectional difference that he will repel the other sections.
When compromise fails, the sectional clash occurs that is familiar to the student of American history. If the heroes are living and embody sectional feelings that will stop at nothing, there is nothing to do but have a show of strength. But if the heroes are dead and thus about to enter the realm of myth, we may witness a curious sort of adjustment. The Northerner may attempt to annex the Southern hero, as Mr. Hendrick does, by distilling out of him most of his sectional essence. (It will be noted that in The Lees of Virginia Mr. Hendrick plays up the nation and the state and plays down the section-the South). Some years ago Gamaliel Bradford attempted a similar feat in Lee the American. But his attempt to capture Robert E. Lee did not go far beyond the title of his book, which in its details does not bear out his implied claim. On the Northern side, this kind of adjustment comes easier than it does in the South, for the victor can afford to be generous.
On the Southern side, adjustment often takes a different form, which is of the nature of genuine folk-myth. The Northern hero gets appropriated—or cancelled—by some depreciatory or possessive legend. There is a legend, well-known in every part of the South, that Lincoln was the illegitimate son of John C. Calhoun; and another one claims that Lincoln was the half-brother of Jefferson Davis. On the Northern side this sort of thing is paralleled by the story, widely circulated during the War, that General Lee whipped and mistreated his slaves. And there is of course a Northern story that all the finest Southern gentlemen regularly cohabited with Negro women. All these stories are of the inferior type of myth known as gossip, and their purpose is evidently apologetic and more than a little malicious.
But though they do deadly work, they may be less dangerous than another kind of adjustment, witnessed in the sectionalist who denies his own myth and takes up the myth of another section. Often enough this may be noble and sincere enough. In all sections there are invariably sectional dissenters, as there were Copperheads in the North and Unionists in the South in war times. In modern times, too, there are dissenters who might be called disillusionists. We may have considerable respect for a dissent arising from principle, but it is hard to contemplate with any great respect a surrender of native myth when it has the flavor of being done in bald accordance with self-interest only. If a Southerner who is not of Unionist and Republican antecedents whole-heartedly adopts the Northern myth of Lincoln, he is naturally suspected of having an ax to grind, and generally he does. He is likely to be a "progressive" Southerner, out for all the material improvement of the Northern model that he can secure. Often he will not only take up Lincoln but surrender Lee, so ardent will be his recantation; or he will surrender Lee the soldier and adhere only to the milder, more yielding Lee, the college president and quietist. On the Northern side, however, there is not an equal tendency to recantation. The Northerner often appropriates Lee, but he rarely disowns Grant or Sherman or Lincoln. Significantly, it is most often Lee that he wants to appropriate. The Northerner reaches forth no clutching hand toward Stonewall Jackson.
Such adjustments, interesting though they may be, are hardly good enough to meet our difficulty, and they need only to be identified to receive the mistrust that they deserve. In the field of history our necessary loyalty to fact drives us to a continual checking and rechecking which in the end always upsets the false claim, even at the cost of spoiling some fine myths in the process. The sense of humor of Americans will not deal gently with such conceptions as Mr. Lloyd Lewis offers in his Myths After Lincoln. What American, whether he hails from Georgia or Illinois, could suppress a snicker at the notion of Lincoln as a "Dying God," a sort of American goulash of Osiris, Adonis, Baldur, and Christ? Besides, we are committed to a peculiar kind of nationalism which obliges us to view our great men in the national or Federal sphere with a certain Platonic reserve. Our regard for George Washington is Platonic.
In the field of myth, where regard ceases to be Platonic and becomes really warm, the heroes turn out to be sectional, and their sectional particularity is too recognizable for them to be taken over where they are not understood and do not belong. There is no better proof of the existence of a barrier than what happens to heroes in our literature. Our history books are rich with heroic material, but not our works of literature. Whitman, who proposed to write national poems, celebrated Federal soldiers and nobly commemorated the fallen Lincoln; but he left the Confederate side alone. Benét's epical poem, John Brown's Body, although it deals generously with the Southern side, nevertheless by its very title, thesis, and conception makes the wrong approach to Southern feeling. We have minor heroical works that deal with sectional heroes, but we have no Finn or Arthur or Roland. In our literature there is an astonishing scarcity of works of fiction, drama, or poetry that deal convincingly with Washington, Jefferson, Lee, and other great names.
Only in genuine folk-myth do the barriers dissolve or tend to dissolve. It is hard to question the national pretensions of such figures as Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, Casey Jones, and John Henry; or of semi-literary but folkish creations like Leatherstocking, Rip Van Winkle, Huck Finn; or against semi-historical people whose mythical images are greater than their real images: Crockett, Pocahontas, Tecumseh, Sitting Bull, Miles Standish, Jesse James. The only trouble is that they are heroic symbols of an America that we cannot recover by romantic glances and scholarly researches only; that is, not recoverable in some high spiritual sense unless we bring the America of today into better harmony with it, as Yeats and Æ strove to do for the Ireland of the eighteen-nineties. But the Celtic analogy is not quite exact. The United States are not one potential Ireland but several. The merest look at the above loose enumeration will show that our folk-heroes are also divided. They show traces of sectionalism and marks of occupation, race, and class.
On what terms, then, do we have our American heroes? Let the crystal-gazer who can peer into the hidden unity of American character give a simple answer if he dare. To those who are not crystal-gazers, a complex and guarded answer seems wise. Let us beware how we nationalize the sectional hero or sectionalize the national hero. If we are to have any national heroes at all, they are best let alone in the entirely secular sphere, where, when admired, they will secure a Platonic admiration suitable to the highly abstract device by which the nation was originally put together. And the sacred sphere, where passionate devotion has a right to reign, not too closely queried by the cold instruments of pure history, is reserved for the sectional heroes in whose images we know our better, our wished-for selves. We govern best in the first sphere; but we best build shrines in the second.
