Sol Bloom

The last of our hero-makers, Representative Sol Bloom, took to George Washington the way a spring salmon takes to the Columbia River. By the time Bloom left Congress, Washington was almost better known than Mary Pickford.

The son of Polish Jewish immigrants, Sol began his career in a San Francisco brush factory. Subsequently he became ticket agent, show manager, producer, hootchy-kootchy inventor, music publisher, and backer of the first ferris wheel. When the SpanishAmerican War broke out, he demonstrated that he was more than equal to the occasion. The same day that news of the Maine disaster broke he completed and published a tune called, "The Heroes who Sank with the Maine." If you gave Sol an idea, he could make it go.

Feeling be had gone far enough, Sol Bloom retired in 1923 a millionaire, and proceeded to devote himself to public service. Tammany Hall backed him for Congress in the plush Riverside Drive district of Manhattan. He managed to get seated in a contested election, and to stay until his death in 1949.

However, Bloom's bizarre bills and fist fights in Congress were nothing as compared to his hero-making. In 1930 he became associate director of the George Washington Bicentennial Commission. His coequal on the Commission, U. S. Grant III, grandson of the General who made a name for himself by sticking it out on a battleline all winter, did not persist like his namesake. He left Bloom in sole control. The new commander not only filled the breach, he spilled all over the wall. Before Congress knew what had happened, he organized a nine months' celebration, nailed down an appropriation of $338,000, and hired a staff of 125. During the legislative recess he devoted fifteen hours a day to George in one way or another. Millions of printed pieces jammed the nation's letter boxes. Tons of Washington badges, buttons, and busts went on sale. Sol even took over, with Washington's help, Mother's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Goethe's birthday. Finally he set up his own radio station, with antenna on top of the Washington Monument. Never, but never, has one man said so much about Washington to so many. As Will Rogers wrote in a letter to the Congressman, "You are the only guy who ever made a party run nine months, and you did it in dry times, too. You made the whole country Washington conscious."

A newspaper cartoon pictured Sol in a Continental uniform, with the caption, "First in War, first in Peace, first in Bicentennial publicity." One columnist thought he was getting to look more and more like Washington. A Republican Senator replied there was little cause for alarm just as long as Washington didn't start to look like Sol Bloom.

To no one's surprise, Sol's offer of $500 for any suggestion to publicize Washington that had escaped him went unclaimed. Sol knew why. "I have taught more real American history in the last twenty years to more students than anyone in the United States," he claimed. Even those who would quibble with the Congressman's definition of "real American history" must concede that no one else has ever done more for Washington. Weems, Marshall, Sparks, Stuart, and Houdon will have to move over and make room for Sol Bloom.

Stuart's Washington

In seeking to immortalize Washington, most artists have actually dehumanized him. Glance at a Washington portrait and you will see how true this is. Done after Washington acquired his poorly-fitting wooden false teeth, most of them picture a dour man with a letter-box mouth.

No one knows how many people have come to think of Washington as looking like the Gilbert Stuart likeness, but their number must run into the millions. His Lansdowne and Athenaeum portraits stare out at us from books, stamps, tablets, advertisements, even bills. The former work, done for the Marquis of Lansdowne, represents Washington standing by a table, his right hand extended. The latter, purchased for the Boston Athenaeum in 1832, depicts only the head. Stuart copied it so many times when he needed money that he called it his hundred dollar bill. If his copies showed signs of haste, they were not admired any the less. Seeing one in England, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, "I am proud to see that noblest face and figure here in England; any English nobleman would look like common beef or clay beside him." Stuart's portrait, Emerson insisted, showed an Allegheny-like calm which contrasted sharply with the hysteria of later politicians. In 1932 the Athenaeum portrait was given over to the assembly line; the Washington Bicentennial Commission set out to place a poster-size reproduction in every American school. Hardly a child could have avoided seeing it several times a day. During the Bicentennial, Stuart's Washington was the official portrait; Congress authorized 750,000 reproductions. For better or worse, it is the one most Americans know.

The French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon devoted much of his long creative life to heroic statues. None had more effect than that of George Washington. Statues of Europeans like Rousseau, Diderot, Moliére, Napoleon, and Lafayette, or of Americans like Franklin, Fulton, Jones and Jefferson may be better as art; but Houdon's Washington has made a more enduring popular impression.

In 1784 the State of Virginia voted to have a Washington statue made. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, then in Europe, selected Houdon to execute it. He traveled to Mount Vernon to study Washington. Like everyone else, he was deeply impressed by the man's qualities. Patiently he watched for the right moment, to catch it in stone; it came one day when Washington, like an aging defiant eagle, scornfully dismissed a horse trader who suggested a dishonorable advantage. Completed in Paris and returned to Virginia in 1796, the statue has an inscription in keeping with the nobility of the work: "Fait par Houdon, citoyen Français, 1788."

Houdon realized that the Washington idolized by the people was a modern Cincinnatus. So he showed him with a civilian's cane in his right hand, a column of thirteen rods under his left hand, and the mold board of a plow under the column. The forthrightness gave it a strength found only in great sculpture. Virginia eventually insured the statue for a million dollars and put an iron fence around it.

As with Stuart's portrait, reproductions help explain the Houdon vogue. A private company and a public committee--the Gorham Manufacturing Company and the Washington Bicentennial Commission--motivated many of them. The former secured permission to make bronze copies, which now appear in museums and cities around the world. Thanks to Gorham enterprise, visitors to London's Trafalgar Square, Chicago's Art Institute, and Tokyo's Embassy Gardens daily encounter Houdon's Washington. Countless reproductions were made during the 1932 celebrations. As one of its schemes, the Bicentennial Commission distributed plaster copies to public schools from coast to coast. Here was a threedimensional Washington to see, admire, and carry away in one's memory. Reproductions in books and on posters defy counting. Small wonder that it is one of the best-known statues of modern times.

George Washington, Mason Weems, John Marshall, Jared Sparks, Gilbert Stuart

Washington-worship, be it noted, has not been limited to America. It has jumped boundaries and oceans with ease. In France, Napoleon Bonaparte ordered a week of national mourning when Washington died. Alfieri and Botta in Italy, Byron and Thackeray in England, and Kosciuszko in Poland knelt from afar, looking toward the Washington shrine. Translations of the Farewell Address flooded South America and Washington's picture was displayed beside Simon Bolivar's frequently. The modest squire of Mount Vernon had become a world hero. In time, revolutions in far away places paid him homage. The well-laid foundations of the Washington legend today support a structure international in design and craftsmanship.

Who were the chief architects of this structure? Parson Mason Weems, John Marshall, Jared Sparks, Gilbert Stuart, Jean Antoine Houdon, and Sol Bloom. Without their words, pigment, stone, and strategy Washington's reputation would have been different from what it now is. The name of Weems heads the list. The nineteenth son of a Scotch immigrant, he never lost his hungry look; what he lacked in veracity he made up in daring. Minister, bookseller, fiddler, sentimentalist, keeper of the public pulse, Weems emerged in literature as the poor man's Plutarch. He helped create, as Stewart Holbrook reminds us, a mythical Wash. ington, "fantastically bloodless and good, who in spite of much corrective writing largely endures to this day. That is the way it is with folklore, and history good or bad can do little but dent it here and there, and gnaw away at the edges." 3

Whatever his shortcomings, Parson Weems was an ingenious writer and clever publicist. Best known for his life of Washington, he also did biographies of Benjamin Franklin, William Penn, and Francis Marion. Studying great men made his "bosom heave with emotions unutterable, while the tear of delicious admiration swelled in my eyes." When he got to Washington, the tears became a torrent. His temperament and experience were highly susceptible. He took naturally to praising famous men fervently in his sermons and stump speeches. While he probably had met the General and had been a collector of Washington items, this hardly justified his conferring upon himself the rectorship of Mount Vernon Parish, particularly since there was none of that name. He just was not the type of man to be bound by the tyranny of facts, even when they were covered with clerical garb.

When Washington died suddenly in 1799, hundreds of sketches and sermons came from the presses. The one that most clearly set the future pattern of eulogy was Weems' History of the Life, Death, Virtues, and Exploits of General Washington, published in 1800. It was seldom a hard book to come by. Responsive to the law of supply and demand, Weems revised and fattened his work frequently; the fifth edition issued in 1806 had 250 pages. Sales continued strong long after Weems passed to the land of no revisions. In 1921 the seventy-ninth successful edition appeared.

Anticipating Horatio Alger, Weems made the Washington saga a formalized success story. "Here was a proper rise for you,"
he gloated when Washington snared the rich widow Custis. In the fifth edition he introduced the cherry tree story (the most persistent single legend in American history), the cabbage story, and the wild colt story. Granting that many of his tales were concocted, one feels that scientific historians have been unduly severe to this mixer of mythology, musket-balls, and the backwoods. Shame on Allan Nevins for saying, as he does in the Encyclopedia of Social Science, that Weems "long exercised a deplorable influence upon popular history."

Weems worked in the super-historical realm. There were and are two Washingtons. Weems concerned himself with the invented one. Of course his Washington was very different from the one born and reared in Virginia; he was bound to be. Americans of yesteryear who read Weems weren't concerned with the accuracy of the portrait. They read with their hearts. Many cried when they came to the account of Washington's death:

"Swift on angel's wings the brightening Saint ascended; while voices more than human were warbling through the happy region and hymning the great procession towards the gates of heaven. His glorious coming was seen from afar off; and myriads of mighty angels hastened forth with golden harps, to welcome the honoured stranger."

Let those who question such zeal bow their heads in silence.

No attempt at sublety lurks in Weem's words. His essential achievement can be stated in three words. He got across. He made intelligible the type of hero young America craved, and he had a virtue thoroughgoing historians lacked--he was readable; and the common man appreciated this. So when Weems died they made up legends about him, just as he had done about Washington. Tall tales concerning his life are still going the rounds in the South.

Chief Justice John Marshall and historian Jared Sparks turned the flesh and blood Washington into marble. The great jurist did not start out with this end in view. In the winter of 1800 Bushrod Washington, nephew and literary executor of the General, asked the judge to do an official biography. Marshall, then heavily in debt, was delighted. Four or five volumes properly sold, he calculated, should bring in $50,000. Besides, had he not served with Washington throughout the Revolution? Was he not a fellow Virginian and patrician, keenly appreciative of Washington's heritage?

An enormous amount of material (it now comprises thirty printed volumes) was made available to the Justice. The mass of paper did not digest easily, but Marshall set doggedly to work and wrote two volumes by 1804. In the first one, which opened with John Cabot's voyage and ended with the French and Indian War, Washington's name appeared only twice; volume two managed to reach the battle of Trenton. Volume three dragged through 1779, and four barely managed to get Washington back home after the war. The fifth and best volume covered the presidential years and Federalist politics. John Adams described the finished product as a mausoleum 100 feet square at the base and 200 feet high. The demigod Washington now had a place to rest in peace. Parson Weems, who probably never read all of Marshall's volumes, thought of an apt descriptive title. He called them the Washingtoniad.

The work of Jared Sparks raises fundamental questions. How much should historic truth be doctored to encourage heroic legend? Where does obligation to truth stop and poetic license begin? Should we attribute to great men what they actually said or did, or what they should have said and done? How deep should the editor's pencil dig? Jared Sparks is the Pontius Pilate of American historians.

Raised on a small Connecticut farm, Sparks ( 1789-1866) soon displayed a brilliance that eventually made him president of Harvard and a Washington scholar almost literally beyond compare. He read Virgil at the rate of a hundred lines a day after less than eight weeks' schooling. When Harvard's President Kirkland reviewed his college record he concluded, " Sparks is not only a man, but a man and a half." After a try at the ministry, Jared worked on the North American Review. There he developed a concern for history and documents that affected the rest of his life. He became our first highly efficient collector and editor of documents. The face of Washington he moulded into a death mask of perfection.

After years of historical writing, Sparks secured permission to remove the Washington papers from Mount Vernon to Boston, where he could study them at leisure. "I hear you are the richest, the busiest, and the happiest man in New England, perhaps the world," Miss A. G. Storrow, a friend, wrote him. No one could have been more ecstatic about Washington's papers than he; eventually he produced twelve volumes from them.

This earnest New Englander thought of himself as a portrait painter in words and a moralist in interpretation. History-as-it-is did not interest him nearly so much as history-as-it-ought-to-havebeen. "He thought," John Bassett tells us, "that a sacred halo surrounded the life of a great man, which profane hands should not break lest ordinary men should lose their proper reverence for authority, and for the noble ideals which were embraced in the higher specimens of the race. He could not make up his mind to paint Washington with small faults, and so altered his language."

With his assistant Samuel A. Eliot, Sparks made many changes and deletions in the Washington manuscripts. He altered, for example, "Old Put" to General Putnam, and deleted comments on certain New England officers whom Washington thought were "nearly of the same kidney" as cowardly privates. The English historian Lord Mahon was taken aback. "I am bound to think Mr. Sparks has printed no part of the correspondence precisely as Washington wrote it; but he has greatly altered, and as he thinks corrected and embellished it," he noted with polite restraint.

The "Sparks Controversy" was on. The details need not concern us. Nor need we debate whether Sparks was justified in making alterations. What matters here is what he did to the Washington image. Certainly he crystallized the priggish Washington that Parson Weems and Chief Justice Marshall had already begun to form. The Washington Sparks bequeathed to the nineteenth century was aptly described by a twentieth century historian: "He had no vices; he had no temper; he was completely unselfish. Is it any wonder that he became so strongly entrenched in the American mind that modern history and biography are condemned --generally unheard--when they present their views of the man as he really was?"

In Four in America the cryptic Gertrude Stein summed up the incredible situation in a line. "She is very sleepy, George Washington."

E Pluribus Unum: George Washington

Did anyone ever see Washington, the Father of our Country, nude? Nathaniel Hawthorne felt impelled to pose the question and answer it categorically: "It is inconceivable. He had no nakedness, but was born with his clothes on, and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world." Horatio Weld felt rather strongly about a child's first reference to him. "The first word of infancy should be mother, the second father, the third Washington." Artemus Ward chose carefully from his misspellings and described Washington as "a human angil in a 3 kornered hat and knee britches." None of them suggested that under the britches was a human body.

Perhaps, as some contend, Mom is becoming harder and harder to handle; but America is still a man's land, and George Washington remains our symbolic Father. The millions of tourists who visit his grave at Mount Vernon sense this deeply. They go to revere not a man, but a demigod. In death, as in life, Washington has a niche no other American can occupy. If one man can be said to have knit together the American union, and earned its acclaim richly, his name is surely George Washington.

Though disillusioned by some events and perplexed by others, modern Americans have not discarded their Father. "He, personally, was 90% of the force which made of the American Revolution a successful issue," states William Carlos Williams. "Know the intimate character of Washington himself, and you will know practically all there is to understand about the beginnings of the American Republic." Few would say 90% was too high. Certainly not those who knew the living Washington and may have heard him say he had inherited "inferior endowments from nature." And surely not those who went through the Revolution with him, quite aware that he lost a great many more battles than he won.

Washington was born on the family estate in Westmoreland County, Virginia, in 1732, and raised in a rural environment. After his father's death in 1743, he was guided largely by his half-brother, Lawrence, who got him a job as surveyor. In 1753 George had his first military experience in a foray against the French and Indians in the Ohio country. At Great Meadows (near present Pittsburgh), he built Fort Necessity, but was forced to retreat when French pressure mounted. After his participation in the unsuccessful attack on Fort Duquesne led by General Braddock ( 1755), he served as commander of the Virginia forces on the western frontier for two years. Experience, not theory, was the basis of his insight and leadership.

When still a youth, Washington's countrymen marked him for greatness. In a 1755 sermon Samuel Davies, later president of Princeton, talked of "that heroic youth, Colonel Washington, whom I cannot but hope providence has hitherto preserved in so signal a manner, for some important service to his country." Like most colonials, Davies had marveled when he heard that during Braddock's rout Washington had had two horses shot from under him and that four bullets had pierced his clothes. From such tales legends grew. Some were so exaggerated that Washington had to write home to deny "a circumstantial acct. of my death and dying speech."

When Washington was chosen to head the American Revolutionary forces, all sorts of stories about him began to make the rounds of the Continental Congress. Had you heard that Washington had offered to recruit a thousand soldiers at his own expense, and march them to Boston? Of course you had. And of course you didn't put any credence in the report that there had been no such offer. For you, like most Americans of your day, were hungry for a living symbol of your revolt, and quick to see one in Washington.

So you joined in the celebrations of his birthday while he was still the harassed commander of a lank, losing army. You may have helped mob a New Jersey printer, William Goddard, when he dared publish Charles Lee's version of his run-in with the idolized General. And you certainly read some of the popular broadsides about Washington, which sold for twopence. You never thought about it, but you were helping to create a national hero.

Charles Lee, who was relegated to the villain's dungeon when he crossed Washington, was among the first to note the rise of the Washington cult. "He has long been in this state of divinity," Lee wrote his sister in the summer of 1782, "but of late the legality of his apotheosis begins to be called in question." Lee was right about the apotheosis, wrong about its legality. Never was an apotheosis so legal in the court of final appeal. The people's judgment was practically unanimous. Overnight Washington became one of the few men in history big enough to fill the vacuum when no symbol existed for a major revolution. His prestige after Cornwallis' surrender was even greater than that of the government of the United States. When he died in 1799, a symbol and a tradition, as well as a human body, was buried at Mount Vernon.

Washington's appeal did not come after time had minimized his bad traits and magnified his good ones. His own generation lionized him. Parson Weems confidently called him "our demigod" in 1800. In the same year a Pennsylvania German farmer wrote Washingtons Ankunft in Elisium, in which Washington strolled around heaven chatting with Brutus and Columbus. Even though he led a successful rebellion against British authority, Englishmen praised him as extravagantly as the most uncritical of his American admirers. Few men have aroused such high regard from those against whom they rebelled.

Did Washington pass over to Valhalla at any particular moment? Probably not; only Hollywood can simplify the historical process to that extent. But if Washington had a finest hour, it came in 1797 when he voluntarily left the Presidency. His conduct in war, as leader of the Revolution, won him fame, but his conduct in peace, as first helmsman of the new Republic, won him immortality. In youth he craved war; in maturity he wisely avoided it. Rather than indulge in the popular practice of twisting the lion's tail, he sanctioned Jay's Treaty with England, which won precious years of peace for the wobbly young democracy.

"I heard the bullets whistle, and believe me, there is something charming in the sound," Washington wrote his half brother after a skirmish at Great Meadow in 1753. But the Washington of 1790 saw through the pomp and power of warfare; he would rather be on his farm than be made emperor of the world. When defeated men shun the ways of war, they show reconciliation; when victorious men abjure them, they show greatness.

Washington even resisted the powers of peace, which as king or dictator, he could have enjoyed in the vaguely united states. Like Cincinnatus, he not only wielded authority but relinquished it. Having the key to unlimited power challenged but did not corrupt him. Thomas Jefferson recorded an interesting remark of Washington's after a stormy cabinet session in which Jefferson and Hamilton worked over each other's backs with verbal daggers. Washington said, Jefferson reported, "he had never repented but once then having slipped the moment of resigning his office, and that was every moment since; that by God he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation." Here was a man who knew what Ecclesiastes meant when he talked of vanity and chasing after winds.

Why was Washington immortalized during his lifetime? The answer is complex, but at least four factors contributed. He was capable, aristocratic, commanding; he had the look and manner of greatness. He lived at a time, and participated in events, which aroused the heroic. His incredible patience and tenacity personified the colonies' noble but difficult cause. And he refused to usurp either military or civilian power; when the times that tried men's souls were past, he returned to the land.

The Revolution was America's baptism by fire. Those who saw the licking flames were well aware that souls were being tried. Under Washington's leadership petty jealousies were squelched and England was humbled. Through it all Washington never lost his vision--or aloofness. They never called him George. History, biography, oratory, journalism, poetry, art, and fiction all demonstrate that he is today, as in the past, just what Light Horse Harry Lee said he was in a well-turned metaphor: first in the hearts of his countrymen.

To judge by all the works written about him, one would conclude that Washington was a demigod who came to us flawless, to perform one of God's worthy and inspired projects, then to return to heaven. Paul Svinin, European visitor in 1815, observed that "Every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his home, just as we have the images of God's saints." Such adoration is even more amazing when one considers that Washington lived in the Age of Reason, dedicated to a rationalistic view of nature and humanity.

Adulation of Washington has, of course, risen and fallen with the changing times, as is true for any hero; but three massive peaks are clearly discernible. The first came with General Lafayette's visit to America in 1824, which reawakened all the revolutionary glow and reactivated the tongues of veterans who in all ages become more heroic as they are further removed from the battlefield. Lafayette's long and dramatic triumphant tour, which belonged to the poetry of history, evoked a flood of Washington worship. "I cannot write or speak the name of Washington without a contraction and dilation of the heart, if I do it irreverently," confessed John Neal.

The second peak was in 1847-48. America was at war with Mexico, fighting blood was bubbling, and newsstands were hawking Revolutionary thrillers and paper-backed Washington biographies. Coinciding with the war hysteria was the laying of the cornerstone of the capital's Washington Monument in 1848. Catherine Maria Sedgwick admitted his name conjured up a sentiment "resembling the awe of the pious Israelite when he approached the ark of the Lord." The Reverend J. N. Danforth compared Washington with Jesus, and his mother with Mary. The pronoun "Him" was capitalized in many accounts of Washington's life. Only the Protestant ethos saved him from canonization.

Part of this upsurge crystallized into the crusade to "save" Mount Vernon, which had become weedy in the generation after Washington's death. Ann Pamela Cunningham worked hard for this, as did the orator Edward Everett, who delivered his famous Washington oration 129 times between 1856 and 1860, trading his warmed-over words for cold cash. Mount Vernon was saved. It became, and still is, a public shrine. For a while, however, it looked as if Mount Vernon would be on the boundary of two nations instead of in the center of one. In the arguments leading to secession Washington's name was evoked by both sides; Northerners and Southerners were equally sure that a live Washington would have fought with them. When finally the split occurred, the Confederates chose George Washington to appear on their great seal, and a collateral descendant, Robert E. Lee, to lead them.

Washington's bicentennial year, 1932, was the tallest peak of all. Then America was brimming with nostalgia for the Father. The printed report of the Bicentennial Commission alone filled five huge volumes averaging 700 pages each. Over 16,000 celebrations were staged, featuring 4,760,245 separate programs. The man most responsible for all this, Representative Sol Bloom, we shall discuss presently.

O Brave New World: John Smith

On the threshold of American history stands one of our most controversial heroes. Although he barely had a toe hold on the New World, he has not been budged by the heaviest scholarly attacks. So enmeshed was colonial America in European folkways that we could hardly have expected an enduring hero before Plymouth Rock was settled. Yet we have Captain John Smith. One of the most fascinating American heroines, Pocahontas, comes with him.

Subjugator of nine-and-thirty kings, by his own say-so, John Smith aroused derision as easily as he made legends. "It soundeth much to the dimunition of his deeds," Thomas Fuller wryly complained, "that he alone is the herald to publish and proclaim them." More recently, Professor Walter Blair irreverently noted that " Smith could hardly go for a walk without saving a beautiful damsel, or having one fall head over heels in love with him." But Smith's admirers have not been fazed. "To set him down as an arrant braggadocio would seem to some critics," observed historian John Fiske, "essential to their reputation for sound sense." A. G. Bradley found in the Smith saga "nothing to strain the credulity of anyone with a tolerable grasp of historical and social progress." Hero or faker, Captain John Smith has held the popular imagination so firmly that he and Pocahontas are our best known colonial couple.

Smith's checkered career was distinctly susceptible of the heroic. He spent so much of his life acting the part of the swashbuckler that he came to play the role expertly. Son of a prosperous English tenant farmer, he left home in 1596 at sixteen to seek Adventure. If his own account can be trusted, he performed marvelous deeds in the Mediterranean and the Near East. He served with the Austrians against the Turks in 1602, saw duty on the Hungarian border, and was still young when he set out for the New World in 1607. After spending two and a half years in Virginia he was returned to England. Chagrined by the treatment he had received and embittered by those who had ejected him, he induced influential enemies of the men in control of Virginia to sponsor his "authentic" account of the New World. His not too ulterior motive was to prove that the actions of certain Englishmen interfered with colonial enterprise, and that the colonies prospered more under royal control than under corporate management.

The spectacular Pocahontas rescue story (whether or not is was true) was a means of bringing the Captain back into the limelight he so enjoyed. In consequence, when Pocahontas arrived in England in 1616, she got much attention. As Lady Rebecca she cut quite a figure, and of a style the Elizabethans appreciated. In his Generall Historie ( 1624), Smith recorded that "In the utmost of many extremities Pokahontas, the great King's daughter of Virginia, oft saved my life." People of his day wanted to believe it; people of ours do too. Adopting a hero is basically an act of faith.

The literature about the English adventurer is so extensive that it forms a separate chapter in American historiography. Although his contemporaries had some doubts about Captain John Smith's veracity, his role as savior of the Virginia colony, and Pocahontas's action at the execution block were widely accepted up to the midnineteenth century. In 1791 Noah Webster included Smith's story in The Little Reader's Assistant. "What a hero was Captain Smith! How many Turks and Indians did he slay!" Seven years after Webster's book appeared, John Davis, an English traveler, made his first voyage to the New World to gather material for his highly laudatory books entitled Captain John Smith and Princess Pocahontas, and The First Settlers of Virginia. Smith's story, it should be noted, is immortalized in bronze on the west door of the entrance to the Capitol rotunda in Washington. A painting conspicuously displayed inside the building shows "The Baptism of Pocahontas at Jamestown." No one has objected to their being there or doubted their justification.

Traveling through Virginia in 1817, the Knickerbocker poet James Kirke Paulding observed, "Fortitude, valor, perseverance, industry, and little Pocahontas . . . [are] tutelary deities." George Washington Parke Custis, whose loyalty to things colonial was unsurpassed, wrote Pocahontas, a play first produced in Philadelphia in 1830. This was followed by Robert Owen Pocahontas ( 1837), John Brougham Po-ca-hon-tas, Or the Gentle Savage ( 1855), and other plays built around the Indian rescue plot. Pocahontas poems appeared in many pre-Civil War journals. Those by Mary Webster Mosby, Lydia H. Sigourney, Margaret Junkin Preston, and William Waldron were especially popular. Even William Thackeray wrote one, to the gratification of Americans who revered English literature.

By the Civil War, most Americans looked upon John Smith and Pocahontas as splendid representatives of their colonial times. If Smith, who had shown little sympathy towards Yankees (their "humorous ignorancies," he observed, "caused the Plymouth Pilgrims to endure a wonderful deale of misery,") found his chief admirers in the South, he at least had few defamers in the area he himself had named New England.

In 1863 a Boston merchant and historian, Charles Deane, commenced the attack on John Smith. He called the colorful captain a notorious liar and braggart who had invented his dramatic rescue after the lapse of many years. Deane insisted that none of Smith's contemporaries knew of the Pocahontas episode and he concluded there was little truth in it. But the North and the South were then too busy fighting each other to notice Deane. Sectional bitterness still ran high when in 1867 another New Englander, youthful Henry Adams, leveled at John Smith a much more telling blow, Scion of one of America's most tactless family of worthies, Adams had just returned from the seminars of Germany and was anxious to gain attention. His article on Smith in the North American Review ( January, 1867) set off a war of words which echoed down the corridors of the twentieth century.

In his article Adams printed parallel passages from Smith's A True Relation and his Generall Historie for textual comparison. He found the Pocahontas rescue story spurious and labeled Smith incurably vain and incompetent. The readiness with which Smith's version had been received Adams found less remarkable than "the credulity which has left it unquestioned almost to the present day." While the Nation doubted "if Mr. Adams' arguments can be so much as shaken," the Southern Review thought historians dealing in black insinuations were "little worthy of credit, especially when their oblique methods affect the character of a celebrated woman." The Southern Review proceeded to place the Smith-Pocahontas fight on a sectional plane where it stayed for a half century: "If Pocahontas, alas! had only been born on the barren soil of New England, then would she have been as beautiful as she was brave. As it is, however, both her personal character and her personal charms are assailed by at least two knights of the New England chivalry of the present day."

The Yankee knights had only begun their attack. Noah Webster's account for school children gave way to Peter Parley's, which drew as a moral from Smith's escapades "that persons, at an early age, have very wicked hearts." Moses Tyler, John Palfrey, and Edward Channing saw in Smith more bluster than greatness. In his 1881 biography of Smith, Charles D. Warner of Connecticut observed that the Captain's memory became more vivid as he was farther removed by time and space from the events he described. Edward D. Neill Captain John Smith, Adventurer and Romancer was devastating. It discredited the Turkish adventures, pronounced Smith's coat of arms a forgery, found the Pocahontas rescue story laughable, and called Smith's literary works "published exaggerations." A second study by Neill, Pocahontas and Her Companions, flatly stated that her marriage to Rolfe was a disgraceful fraud. North of the Potomac the rescue story began to be called the Pocahontas legend.

Southerners rallied to the defense of their dashing Captain-and of Southern honor. Their counter-attack was so effective that by the middle of the twentieth century Captain John Smith and Pocahontas were generally thought of as human embodiments of epic colonial heroism.

Since Smith, a figure of masculinity and firmness, made an admirable partner for the Indian Princess whose femininity and softness conquered two continents, it is not surprising that their stories were blended into one. The tyranny of historical facts crumbled before the demands of popular fancy and the literary weapons of William Wirt Henry, Wyndham Robertson, Charles Poindexter, and John Esten Cooke.

No one was in a better position to express regional indignation than William Wirt Henry. Patrick Henry's grandson, he was born in 1831 on a plantation in Charlotte County, Virginia. Lawyer and historian, he served as county attorney, state legislator, president of the Virginia Historical Society, and president of the American Historical Society. To his fellow Southerners he personified the Tidewater planter-aristocrat. At the 1882 Virginia Historical Society meeting, he read a paper called "The Settlement of Jamestown, with Particular Reference to the Late Attacks upon Captain John Smith, Pocahontas, and John Rolfe." He came directly to the point: "The more generous task of making their defense will be mine." With care and ingenuity he evolved explanations for the questionable parts of their stories. In a flourish that honored his grandfather's memory, Henry concluded, "We need not pursue this charge of inconsistencies further, as time would fail us to notice every inconsistency charged by the numerous and ill-informed assailants of Smith."

To Henry there was no doubt whatsoever that the success of the Virginia Colony had depended on the Captain. "The departure of Smith changed the whole aspect of affairs. The Indians at once became hostile, and killed all that came in their way." To the Indian Princess Pocahontas he assigned a religious role and mission. She was, in Henry's opinion, "a guardian angel [who] watched over and preserved the infant colony which has developed into a great people, among whom her own descendants have ever been conspicuous for true nobility." On that exalted note, the defense rested.

Equally qualified to fight for "Captain Jack" was Wyndham Robertson, who was raised on a plantation near Petersburg, Virginia. Educated in Richmond and Williamsburg, he became Virginia's twentieth governor. Northern attacks on John Smith disturbed him so much that he prepared a detailed study: Pocahontas and Her Descendants. Taking the marriage of Pocahontas and Rolfe in 1614 as a focal event, Robertson traced the subsequent family to "its seventh season of fruitage." His work was unabashedly presented as "the vindication of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas against the unfriendly strictures of modern critics." Because Pocahontas' descendants were so notable, so was she; this simple a posteriori argument ran through the whole book. Among those who turned out to be related to her were the Bollings, Branches, Lewises, Randolphs, and Pages -- the very cream of Virginia.

How, asked Robertson, could anyone speak lowly of the Princess when the King of England and the Bishop of London were her devotees? Her natural charm had captivated Mother England. Leaders of society competed for her favor; she had a special seat when Ben Jonson Twelfth Night masque was staged at Whitehall; her portrait revealed a truly aristocratic countenance. "With festival, state, and pompe" the Lord Mayor of London feted her before death cut short her dazzling career. "History, poetry, and art," wrote Robertson, "have vied with one another in investing her name from that day to the present with a halo of surpassing brightness." His argument by association, like that of descent, was persuasive. To ridicule Pocahontas was to deny the importance of family and ancestry in society. Most Americans and practically every Southerner were not prepared to do so.

Charles Poindexter, a more scholarly defender of Smith, was educated at the University of Virginia; he joined the Richmond Howitzers during the Civil War. Long interested in Old Dominion heroes, he published in 1893 John Smith and His Critics. At the time he was State Librarian in Richmond. It was in a distinctly fresh light that he viewed the colonial controversy: "Smith's History has been standard reading for 250 years, acknowledged and practically unquestioned, unless by some in these latter days. We may be a simple and uncritical people, but when our belief and judgment as to an historical character are challenged, and we are told our admiration has been wasted on a charlatan, whose boasting has deceived us, then may we raise a question as to the amount of wisdom behind the critic's utterance."

Poindexter explained that Smith was engaged in "a piece of work of transcendent interest and importance, as we know now-namely, the founding of the Commonwealth of Virginia." The whole controversy could never be decided by documents and scholarship. "And yet they tell us, the legend must go; but when it goes it will be time for this people to be gone; to be driven from this fair portion of God's earth, made sacred by that brave man's heroism, and by the gentle pity of that Indian maid . . . Smith's History has established itself as a tradition in the popular mind more lasting and potent than any written page or printed book." Poindexter saw plainly that Smith had moved beyond mere documentary fact.

John Esten Cooke, one of the South's most popular novelists, promoted Smith vigorously. Born in Winchester, Virginia, Cooke wanted "to do for the Old Dominion what Cooper has done for the Indians, Irving for the Dutch Knickerbockers, and Hawthorne for the weird Puritan life of New England." He buried his spurs at Appomattox when Lee surrendered--a gesture in the tradition of Captain Smith. Cooke My Lady Pokahontas ( 1885) is still the best novel about the lady. Purporting to be writing in the seventeenth century, he furnished "notes" to a True Relation of Virginia, Writ by Anas Todkill, Puritan and Pilgrim. Todkill revealed how Smith fell in love with the Virginia Princess, converted her to Christianity, and strolled hand in hand with her along the James. The lovers decided it was best that they not remain together. In England with her husband John Rolfe, later on, Pocahontas attended the Globe Theater, where William Shakespeare's The Tempest was opening. She promptly recognized herself as Miranda.

What Cooke did in My Lady Pokahontas was to superimpose trappings of a Victorian romance on the story. It is a landmark in the literary treatment of Pocahontas and of the American Indian. In pre-Civil War America the only good Indian was a dead one. As long as the aboriginal was an active threat to settlement and progress, he was given little consideration. For Pocahontas to be a heroine this attitude had to change, and the savage had to become the vanishing American. In the generation after the Civil War this transition took place. A few years later came Helen HuntJackson Jackson's A Century of Dishonor, which called our record in Indian relationships "a shameful one of broken treaties and unfilled promises." Like Uncle Tom's Cabin, the book's effect was far out of proportion to its literary merit. A Century of Dishonor and the ascendancy of the Pocahontas legend coincided.

The influence of Cooke's interpretation of Pocahontas was both direct and indirect. Southern text books adopted his colonial romance; subsequent writers have turned to it nostalgically. Partly through his own books but more particularly through his influence, Cooke fostered the popular conception held by many today.

William Henry gave Pocahontas a religious mission; Robertson set up a patriotic affront; Poindexter put the legend above the documents; Cooke made of it a Victorian romance. Smith and Pocahontas returned to high standing.

In 1907 came the much publicized Jamestown Tercentennial. In preparing for the festivities, the Pocahontas Memorial Association undertook a program of glorification which included a poem by Paulding suggesting Pocahontas' religious role:

"Sister of charity and love, Whose life blood was soft pity's tide. Dear goddess of the sylvan grove Flower of the forest, nature's pride, He is no man who does not bend the knee And she no woman who is not like thee!"

Jamestown Tributes and Toasts contained seven Smith-Pocahontas poems. Little had been done to commemorate the grave of " Rebecca Wrothe, wife of Thomas Wrothe, gent, a Virginia lady born" at Gravesend, England. So the Society of Colonial Dames donated memorial windows to the tiny church in which Pocahontas was buried. At Jamestown, William Ordway Partridge's statue of the Indian princess was erected, flanked by a bronze Captain John Smith.

Lyon G. Tyler unveiled a new Pocahontas tablet at Jamestown, and asked: "What words must I use to express my feelings on this occasion? Her memory brightens with the years and comes to us today as a soft, clear light that shines from a distant shore, where all else is shrouded in darkness." As he spoke, the audience gazed at the statue of the princess provided by the Pocahontas Memorial Association--her hands outstretched to aid the starving Virginia colonists, her eyes appropriately looking toward heaven.

If the preliminary plans for the 1957 celebration of the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the settling of Jamestown come to fruition, Smith's reputation will continue to rise, for he is to be the hero of the program. Another, less ephemeral, multi-million dollar enterprise, only a few miles from the place where the Captain first set foot on the New World, has kept green the memory of seventeenth century things in contemporary America. This is Colonial Williamsburg. While it has not been directly concerned with promoting Smith, his renown has benefited directly and enormously therefrom. The Rockefeller fortune has salvaged reputations as well as buildings.

Dr. W. A. R. Goodwin, late rector of Williamsburg's Bruton Parish Church and incidentally an admirer of John Smith, is generally credited with having persuaded John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to reconstruct the colonial capital. No restoration in history has received such elaborate and painstaking research; none in America is so frequently visited. Representing an expenditure of over $45,000,000 and a yearly operating budget of $2,000,000, Colonial Williamsburg by 1954 had a staff of 1,000 and plans for further capital outlays exceeding $15,000,000. No one could have foreseen such expansion and such influence. The restoration found itself in the position of Lord Byron's teacher:

"She taught the child to read, and taught so well That she herself, by teaching, learn'd to spell."

Rockefeller himself realized that the project would reawaken interest in those he called "great patriots of our American past." Many of the hundreds of thousands of visitors who come every season make the short pilgrimage to Jamestown, to see "the spot where the Anglo-Saxon history of America begins." They find on the small island, which was saved from disintegration only by a seawall put up for the Jamestown Tercentennial, nothing so elaborate as Colonial Williamsburg. But they do view the statue of a handsome, dashing adventurer, whose hand rests near his sword and whose eyes look out on the vast expanses of America. They see Captain John Smith; and they carry him away in their memories as the first great American.

Though the Captain's account does not appear to be based upon undiluted historical fact, it is not totally false. Whether or not Pocahontas really saved Smith at the execution block, and whether or not they actually fell in love, Pocahontas unquestionably visited Jamestown while he was there. These visits ceased after Smith had departed. She evidently took some interest in him and he in the girl he called "the nonpareil of Virginia." Still, it is hard to believe that Smith, who considered the aboriginals as inferior savages that blocked Britain's path, ultimately would have married her. His deportation (resulting from the return of Ratcliffe and Archer, who allied themselves with Smith's enemies Percy and West) ended abruptly any ideas he might have had of a future life with Pocahontas. In his attitude towards the Indians, as in so many things, Smith revealed his English heritage. Always strongly Anglo-Saxon, Virginians have not found it difficult to give him the benefit of their doubts.

Smith's was no crafty, subtle mind. Contemplation was not his forte; he usually acted first and thought afterwards. If he had any philosophy, it was to meet things as they came. His egocentric world was unmarred by indecision, weakness, or indifference. He saw strange seas, dreamed of empires, and lived through an epic. Whatever one thinks of some of his actions and accusations, one must admire the loyalty and enthusiasm he displayed while exploring the New World. He loved Virginia as "my wyfe, to whom I have given all." No matter how much he exaggerated on occasions, he was telling the truth when as a dying man he wrote, "All the dangers, miseries, and incumbrances and losse of other employments while in Virginia I endured gratis."

After his deportation from Virginia, Smith was dogged by constant failure. In 1615 he convinced Sir Ferdinando Gorges to outfit him for another try at colonizing the New World, but his two small vessels were driven back by storms. Again he set sail, with only a small barque of sixty tons at his command. This time he was captured by pirates, wrecked off La Rochelle, and returned home penniless. When he died he was a poor, weary man, leaving only eighty pounds, twenty of which (in a typical gesture) he directed to be spent on his funeral. The only relatives mentioned in his will were a cousin and the widow of his brother. London's Great Fire of 1666 wiped out St. Sepulchre's Church, in which his body was buried, and his epitaph with it. The last earthly trace of John Smith is gone forever.

The New World for which "Captain Jack" fought has adorned his memory with honor more enduring than all the treasure won by others on the Spanish Main. For many Americans he is today the last of the Knight-Errants, a cross between the medieval crusader and the Jacobite Cavalier. Because his pageantry seemed so incongruous in the vast wilderness of the New World, there is a Don Quixote-like pathos about him. Had he not been so earnest about his schemes of colonization, they would have been ludicrous. He never doubted, up to his dying day, that he could accomplish the impossible. His ambitions were so lofty that inability to consummate them did not destroy their appeal. With all his faults, he set the heroic pattern in colonial America.

Smith has been at the core of controversy; John Rolfe, who actually married the Indian Princess Pocahontas, has not. Little is said of this gentleman of moderate means who came to Virginia in 1609, experimented with the growing and curing of tobacco, and perfected the plant which was the foundation of Virginia's economy. His marriage to a native brought peace at a time when the Indians might have driven the colonists into the sea. But he did not catch the popular imagination, and he did not become a hero.

That Pocahontas, an Indian girl who died at twenty-two, became a legendary figure is extraordinary. Virginias are proud to have her blood in their veins. But they would hardly admit to a drop from any other member of her race. What is it about her that has so appealed to posterity? Not the savage, but the feminine quality. She is the fairy-tale princess come to life; a flesh-and-blood Cinderella in Indian disguise. Her story is full of romance and excitement. She rescued Smith by risking her own life. After a sad separation from him, she was wooed by a white knight from overseas, John Rolfe. She brought peace to the struggling colonists. Best of all, Little Wanton went as a princess to the Mother Country, where she outshone all the celebrated English beauties. Virginia, loyal to Charles I when even England rejected him, thrilled at this. Finally, she suffered a premature and unexpected death. What more could a romantic heroine's story contain? In November, 1952, a "Chapel of Unity" was opened to her memory at Gravesend, England. It has already become a pilgrimage spot.

Attacks on John Smith and Pocahotas have become fewer and less bitter in recent years. Dr. Charles Andrews, the New England colonial historian, supported the rescue story. The 1927 biography of Smith by E. K. Chatterton, and the 1929 book by John Gould Flecther, revealed a far greater man than earlier accounts. Admittedly "Captain Jack" was given to far-fetched phrases, and to veering off the narrow road of truth. But most of us forgive him. After all, this was his prerogative in the Age of Elizabeth. The same tendencies can be found in other colorful figures of the period --Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake, Kit Marlowe, and William Shakespeare.

The John Smith-Pocahontas story, with its epic quality and scope, has appealed to us because it re-affirms the validity of the American experience. Aided by an Indian Princess, John Smith founded a great nation, and made the dream of a permanent English colony a reality. O brave new world, that has such people in it!

Occasionally a skeptic comes forth claiming that Smith's story (in a phrase of his contemporary Will Shakespeare) has "a very ancient and fish-like smell." But the furor that accompanied the Deane-Adams articles has passed. In 1951 George F. Willison argued (in Behold Virginia: The Fifth Crown) that Smith's surviving his almost incredible follies was the real miracle of his life; that the Virginia records reach "almost to the point of madness, as in Captain John Smith's account of his exploits and accomplishments in that colony, which, so he came to believe, he had founded and sustained almost singlehandedly." The Historical Society of Manatee County, Florida, has challenged historians to prove the truth of Pocahontas's rescue. The story, it was suggested, was probably devised by a press agent of an earlier day. The Indian maiden Hirrihgua, who saved the life of Juan Ortiz in Manatee County, has--or should have, it would appear--a much better claim to fame.

Americans have ceased to worry about the absence of historical authenticity in this matter. The Captain and the Indian Princess have been accepted. No mere documents can unseat them. As James Branch Cabell contemplated them in their aloof majesty, he remarked: "And yet, to the judgment of the considerate, Captain John Smith True Relation does not in any way affect the ranking of Pocahontas in the official history of Virginia; her legend, the more thanks to Virginia's good taste in mythology, has been made immortal."

Most American heroes have historic prototypes

Most American heroes have historic prototypes. Cinderellas in all ages move from obscurity to fame, or, as we say, from rags to riches. Our self-made men include Abraham Lincoln, Henry Ford, and Al Smith. Cincinnatus emerged in a time of crisis to save the state. So did Washington, Lincoln, and Wilson. Europeans found no better example of the Enlightment's "natural man" than Daniel Boone. Kit Carson, Andy Jackson, and Buffalo Bill continued the tradition. Yet in each case there is a flavor, a twist, which is distinctively American. The species is the same; but there are American mutations.

Another major influence working upon American heroes has been regionalism. "The Federal sphere will accommodate the statesmen, but not the hero, in the epical and tremendous sense," Donald Davidson has observed. Regions, and within them localities, are the well-springs of our heroes. Our problem is to venerate our regional heroes without disturbing the national equilibrium. Thus we have Paul Revere, Old Stormalong, and Daniel Webster in the Northeast; Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Andy Jackson on the Appalachian frontier; John Calhoun, R. E. Lee, and the Southern Colonel in the South; Billy the Kid, Bigfoot Wallace, and the Cowboy in the West. Sometimes a dispute over a hero can open up old sectional wounds, as we shall see in the next chapter when we discuss Captain John Smith.

Different ages and ethnic groups select their own favorites: a third major limitation placed on American heroes. The adolescent's choice, used as a model to foster virtues of one sort or another, is directed toward the matinee idol, the movie and television star, and the sports champion. Motivation for these choices varies from sublimated sexual satisfaction, to transfer of personality, to vicarious achievement. The exploitation of personalities, continuous in our history, has been accelerated by modern technology and spectator sports.

Consider George "Babe" Ruth, and the Yankee Stadium often called "the House that Ruth Built." When big league baseball suffered from the disgrace of the Black Sox scandal, publicists diverted attention to a big rollicking kid with a contagious grin and a definite tendency to knock baseballs over fences. Though not especially intelligent, he was colorful; his rise from a Baltimore charity school was a modern Cinderella story. Over the years the home runs, and the Ruth legends, increased. Finally Ruth felt he was the raw material for a new Paul Bunyan. Team mates like "Lefty" Gomez were not so sure. Referring to Ruth's weakness for alcohol Gomez said, "He's the only man in the United States that if you took a pint of blood, it would need a revenue stamp." But his was a champion's blood, and no one ever thought of draining off a pint.

Such charges damaged neither his fame nor his income. Ruth made $80,000 a season, even during hard times. Always a showman, he bought a $5,000 car, gave a more modest one to a priest, and ate eleven hotdogs in one afternoon. In six months he autographed 1100 bats. Feature writers pictured him in a vacant lot with small boys, showing them how to hit. The sick received his special attention, and a paralyzed boy "raised himself" in the excitement over seeing the Bambino hit a home run.

Psychologists subjected Ruth to a "psycho-technical test" which proved his eyes functioned twelve times as quickly as the average man's. They also demonstrated that he outdid 499 out of 500 men in "the responsiveness of his nerves." He was the Sultan of Swat; Beowulf at bat; a miracle worker who hit three World Series homers in one wild afternoon.

After his retirement, people continued to idolize Ruth and eat a candy bar named after him. They spoke of the "first Homeric swat" of May 6, 1915, and recalled that four years later he hit the longest home run then recorded, 508 feet. With two strikes on him in the 1926 World Series, he pointed to a distant spot and yelled at the hooting fans, "I'll knock it out there for you!" He did. It was the longest home run ever made at Wrigley Park.

Mrs. Babe Ruth helped the legend by telling what he said that evening whensomeone praised him for the uncanny stunt: "God was with me, or I couldn't have done it." Gods always help heroes.

One of Ruth's last appearances was with the "All-Time Great" team invited to Baseball's Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Historian Louis Jones wrote of it: "When the Bambino himself stood with the others the crowd, which had loved him and would continue to love him, let out a roar you could hear in the next town. When he spoke it was to the kids who are the backbone of the game. As always, the Babe had stolen the show."

Babe's story is typically American in its enormous gusto and good humor. Our legends are less apt to exalt wisdom or subtlety than brawn and buffoonery. They are full of bears and cyclones and hard liquor. Believing they can do any damn thing once they set their minds to it, our idols don't like fences. One of their inalienable rights is raising hell in their own particular fashion. Blackbeard the pirate illustrated this. Rejected in marriage, he got his revenge by cutting off his rival's hand, throwing him in the sea, and sending the hand to his fiancee in a silver casket; an unorthodox, but effective gesture.

Many assume without much evidence that our legendary heroes have folk origins. Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and Joe Magarac were fostered by writers who are still alive. So far, these heroes stand on a burlesque, rather than an epic, level. Some have distinguished creators. Annie Christmas sprang from the brains of Roark Bradford and Lyle Saxon. Daddy Joe was aided by Stewart Holbrook, Pecos Bill by Edward O'Reilly, Daddy Mention by B. A. Botkin, Big Mose by Herbert Asbury, and Strap Buckner by Florence Barns. Owen Francis championed Joe Magarac; Paul Beath, Febold Feboldson; Charles E. Brown, Whiskey Jack; Jeremiah Diggs, Bowleg Bill; J. Harris Cable, Antoine Barada; Louis Jones, Bill Greenfield; and Mary Montague, Tony Beaver. Many are created, but few survive.

Historical heroes have their backers too. A few, like Parson Weems and Jim Farley, are well known. More often they are anonymous. Admirers of Captain John Smith can seldom identify W. W. Henry or Charles Poindexter, who revived Smith's fame in the twentieth century. Hundreds who praise Buffalo Bill don't know that his stories may be traced to the work of Prentiss Ingraham and John Burke.

Almanac writers who had never seen Davy Crockett made him our greatest ring-tailed roarer. Charles Francis Adams, a Yankee whose family represented the quintessence of New Englandism, convinced America that the Confederate General Lee was a great man. A tenderfoot lawyer from the East ( Emerson Hough) and a veteran Texas cowpoke ( Charles Siringo) made Billy the Kid our favorite desperado. It is time the story of such hero-makers be told. They give a new dimension to our history.

Occasionally a reticent subject appears. While most men are delighted to be the subject of tales and rumors, the godly Peter Cartwright was perplexed by them. "Almost all those various incidents that have gained currency throughout the country concerning Methodist preachers," he complained in 1856, "have been located in me. When they came to hear me in Boston, the people expected little else than a bundle of eccentricities and singularities. When they did not realize according to their anticipations, they were disappointed." Most potential heroes do not disappoint the people; instead, they act out the part others have created for them.

As conditions change, so does the heroic guise. In times of crisis we seek the solidarity of a Lincoln or Wilson. When we are complacent and bored we turn to a Buffalo Bill or Al Capone. We even idolize mediocre men, like U. S. Grant or Warren G. Harding, when they suit their ages. Our special form of settlement, institutions, and development gave us our particular American heroes--men with a local habitation and a name.

Fashions change methodically in heroes. The standard formulas in the days of Buffalo Bill and the penny dreadfuls would never work in this day of science fiction and supersonic sound. David Riesman has observed that children now graduate from animal stories like Bugs Bunny to invincible heroes like Superman and eventually to heroes like Batman who, human in form, are vulnerable, though of course never conquered. Children themselves are aware of the progression, and scorn playmates who don't advance on schedule.

So great is the competition among comic strip artists that they must engage in what Mr. Riesman calls "marginal differentiation" to get their trade mark. Bodies by Al Capp must be as easily recognized as bodies by Fisher. Situations that formerly took many pages must be compressed into a few cartoons. The medium and the paragon must be adjusted to the age.

Film heroes change too. The frantic activism of "Doug" Fairbanks in the 1920's gave way to the homespun wit of Will Rogers in the 1930's, and the casual friendliness of Bing Crosby in the 1940's. All Americans, but especially children, are affected by this evolution in comics and shadowland. In 1950 Lawrence Averill conducted a poll of a thousand teen-agers to find out whom they most admired. Only a third chose historical figures. (In a similar survey made in 1898 by Estell Darrah, 90 per cent came from history.) At the top were baseball's Ted Williams, Hollywood's Gene Autry, and comic-land's Joe Palooka. Four times more boys chose Gene Autry than Jesus Christ. As many named Jack Benny as all priests, scholars, and missionaries combined. In telling whom we like best, we tell what we ourselves are like.

Many are alarmed by our new idols who emerge from ball parks, movies, and comic books. They say the "good old days" of truly impressive American heroes and myths are gone forever. "Good old days" are always gone--this is one of history's truisms. But not the heroic process, which is communal faith channeled to specific cultural purposes, and which grabs up Babe Ruth or Superman as avidly as Samson or Hercules.

Nature has, of course, lost much of its significance for the modern urbanite. Once feared and worshipped, it is now controlled by a flick of the thermostat. Hence it is not from realms of nature and religion, but politics and economics, that many of our heroes arise. Not thunderstorms and snowdrifts, but strikes and inflation, drive us to our knees. New problems demand new kinds of solutions--and new solvers.

What is the thread that holds together the sequence of American heroes? Only a magician who could conjure up the hidden unity of American character would dare give a simple answer. Those of us who fear to try can only search for clues, themes, and leads. Since in this sprawling, diverse land of not very united states it is easier to focus on a figure than an abstract idea or principle, we shall study certain representative heroes and hope they will point to a larger pattern. To master the whole mosaic we shall attempt to remove some of the pieces. If we choose wisely, we may find those on which the lesser pieces depend, and from which they get their shape and values. By dividing the problem of American heroes, perhaps we can make a start towards conquering it.

Columbia's Darlings

On a hot July 1952 afternoon, thousands of people crowded the streets of Chicago. The Republican National Convention was underway and presidential hopefuls were arriving. Word spread that Candidate Robert Taft was about to appear. His campaigners passed out song sheets which demonstrated the light in which American hero-makers want their subjects to appear. Included were "Battle Hymn of the Republic," "Onward Christian Soldiers," and "When the Roll is Called Up Yonder."

Ovations for favorites have been heard frequently in America. Many are forgotten almost as soon as the acclamation is over. Like all countries, America has had its Cagliostros, who blaze momentarily and then fade. The happy tears shed for Admiral Dewey, who avenged the sinking of the battleship Maine, could have floated a ship of the line. Practical businessmen swooned when Jenny Lind hit high C. So did their wives when Buffalo Bill entered the ring on his white horse. Otherwise respectable ladies collected Rudolph Valentino's cigarette butts and hid them in their bosoms. A cordon of policemen had to stop women from taking his buttons as his body lay in state.

In June, 1927, Charles Lindbergh received 3,500,000 letters, 14,000 parcels, and 100,000 telegrams. The New York World got two bushels of Lindbergh poetry. While he was having dinner in New York, a woman broke through his guards to peer into his mouth and determine for herself whether he preferred green beans or green peas. The Hoboes of America proclaimed a thirty-day mourning period when Will Rogers died. Fifty thousand people followed the funeral procession of Sacco and Vanzetti through Boston. Over 7,500,000 pushed into the streets when General MacArthur moved across the country in April, 1951.

Well-fed Americans are starved for the pomp and ritual of older nations. We even have to improvise a pathetic little twenty-minute ritual for the inauguration of our president, the most important official in the world. Our academic rituals are dull and uninspiring, and parades (such as Mardi Gras or the Mummers) have to suffice us as a people. Those who want more form have to get it from ritualistic churches or lodges. There are no prescribed ceremonies for our Independence Day, July 4, or the birthday of the Father of our Country, February 22. Robert's Rules of Order give us about the only national rituals we have.

Such poverty explains the enormous nostalgia for Europe in America, and the mass exodus to Queen Elizabeth's crowning in 1953. For while we are proud of the democratic strain in our heroes, we want them to be as grand as those of other lands. Thus Herman Melville referred to Hercules as "that antique Crockett and Kit Carson."

As foreigners keep telling us, America has lacked many things. Yet no one can say that our people have been deficient in great memories. Without the symbols, heraldry, inherited titles, and traditions which Europeans exalt and revere, Americans have concentrated their affection on a few men. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "If the companions of our childhood should turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not surprise us." He found public idols pivotal in American life, running out threads of relation through everything, fluid and solid, material and elemental. Because it answers an urgent need, hero worship is an integral part of American life.

We identify ourselves with greatness by means of a signature in an album, a lock of hair, a photograph, or a baseball that has scored a home run; we haunt stage doors and locker rooms; we pursue our favorites with candid cameras and sound recorders. Such scientific gadgets put only a thin veneer over the streak of credulity that goes through an America where over 10,000 rabbit feet are still carried in pockets, and 3,300,000 four leaf clovers are bought annually. P. T. Barnum noted almost a century ago that in the United States a sucker is born every minute; and the time ratio hasn't changed perceptibly since then.

Consider, for example, the "American Goliath," that wonderful ten and a half foot petrified giant "discovered" in Onandaga County, New York in 1896. Planted by George Hull near Cardiff, the. gypsum hoax spent a year buried in the portion of New York state that had been the scene of the discovery by Joseph Smith of the Tablets of Moroni; the Spirit Rappings of the Fox Sisters; and the rantings of the End-of-the-World Millerites, the Shakers, and the Publick Universal Friend Jemima Wilkinson. Hull eventually hired two workmen to dig the giant up. One of them, Gideon Emmons, made the observation: "Jerusalem, Nichols, it's a big Injun!" Tens of thousands paid to see it. The giant still attracts many visitors at the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Faith, as well as work, has made America what it is.

A trinity of culture heroes presides over the nation-- Washing ton, Jefferson, and Lincoln. The personification of our Revolution, Washington achieved in his own day as much prestige as the federal government. With his quiet faith in his fellow Americans, and his insistence on the primacy of civil authority, he represents ideals which will not be unseated, in spite of the forbidding portraits and togaed statues. On his two-hundredth birthday there were thousands of "Washingtons" on the map. The national capital, a state, 33 counties, 121 cities and towns, 257 townships, 1140 streets, and uncounted lakes, schools, mountains, and forts bore his name--a tribute which had been paid to no other man, in any country.

Thomas Jefferson, the "Sage of Monticello," is the second member of the triumvirate. Many of his contemporaries were opposed to his ideas and ascendancy. When the 1811 convention met to name what became Louisiana, a delegate from Attakapas threatened to blow up the building if Jefferson's name were even introduced as a possibility. When Jefferson was elected president, Timothy Dwight warned the good ladies of New Haven to stay off the green--because, said the New Englander, they might now be attacked publicly. Jefferson's embargo almost precipitated a Northern secession movement decades before the South left the Union. He received little veneration in the predominantly Republican decades between the Civil War and the Great Depression.

When the Democrats finally took over in 1932, they revived Jefferson's reputation. The giant Mount Rushmore face, the Jefferson postage stamp and nickel, the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., and Roosevelt's Monticello speeches were some of the devices used. By World War II, Jefferson had become a symbol for our endangered democracy, and the Democratic party in power. A century and a quarter after his death, scholars carefully collected and edited his literary remains. Thus finally he was given a high place on Olympus.

The last member of the triumvirate is Abraham Lincoln, about whom Richard Stoddard wrote:

"The People, of whom he was one
No gentleman, like Washington
(Whose bones, methinks, make room
To have him in their tomb!)"

Lincoln's career, from log cabin to White House and to martyrdom, personified the times in which he lived. Had Lincoln not lived, it would have been necessary to invent him. Even when the Confederates poked fun at Abe, they acknowledged his democratic appeal:

" Jeff Davis is our President
Abe Lincoln is a fool,
Jeff Davis rides a big gray horse
While Lincoln rides a mule."

History definitely favors unpretentious men on mules. The Roman emperors rode about on white horses. Christ, who entered a minor Roman provincial city on an ass, conquered the world. Richard the Lion-Hearted galloped proudly into battle. We forget it when we read of gentle mule-mounted Saint Francis, talking to the birds. Stephen Douglas spouted magnificent phrases; Abe Lincoln preferred to tell little stories. He said God must have liked the common people, since He made so many of them. Common people appreciated that.

Despite his humble background, Lincoln was much like Jefferson. Both understood the ethical nature of democracy, and of party politics. Both believed in the goodness of human nature; but Jefferson didn't reach as many levels of society as did Lincoln. Not only did the Virginian lack the common touch; he also missed the opportunity to do anything so dramatic as preserving the Union, and the chance to die a martyr's death.

John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln on April 14, 1865--Good Friday. That he died on the day Christians were celebrating the martyrdom of their Lord was an analogy few ministers missed. Protestant America had acquired a saint. Only five days before the slaying, Lee had surrendered at Appomattox. Congress had ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, and the slaves were free. Then the Savior who had made it all possible was called back to heaven. Lincoln's apotheosis, and Booth's damnation, are central in our heroic history.

Perceptive and ambitious, a master of the American idiom, Lincoln pointed his career along the paths of glory. Devoted admirers pleaded his cause, and historical chance completed the job. For his contemporaries he was a dying god to rank with Osiris, Adonis, or Arthur. Secretary of War Stanton spoke for the nation when he said at the death bed, "Now he belongs to the ages." Walt Whitman called his assassination "one of those climax moments on the stage of universal time, the historic Muse at one entrance, the tragic Muse at the other." In 1954, every car that traveled with an Illinois license plate proclaimed to the world that it came from the "Land of Lincoln." No one can spend an American penny without passing on his image.

To slay a hero is bad business. John Wilkes Booth's act set off a reign of terror in the United States. A brigade of infantry, and uncounted horsemen and detectives, pursued the injured Booth southward after his miraculous escape from the scene of his crime. The federal government offered $100,000 for his capture. Papers and posters stressed that "Everyone should consider his own conscience charged with his solemn duty, and rest neither day nor night until Booth is dead." The hatred shown towards Booth merely indicated the adoration accorded the man whom he martyred. Today, Lincoln is probably the most admired American who has ever lived.

Some think that Franklin D. Roosevelt will turn our trinity into a quartet. Already more has been written about him that any other man since Napoleon. A Franklin D. Roosevelt Association flourishes, and its members collect books, pennants, and buttons featuring their idol. Hyde Park, with over half a million visitors annually, rivals Mount Vernon and Monticello as a tourist attraction. Foreign esteem fostered the re-naming of a main boulevard in Paris, the erecting of a Roosevelt statue in London, and the issuing of commemorative stamps in twenty-three nations.

What explains this admiration of the most controversial figure in our political history is the fact that he (along with Winston Churchill) symbolized the struggle against totalitarian tyranny. F. D. R. is an extension of the Jefferson symbol. With the return of the Republican party in 1952, revisionist historians began to hack away at his reputation and maintain that he had "planned" Pearl Harbor. Only time can determine where the swinging pendulum will come to rest.

Persevering Tortoise, Futile Searcher, Cinderella, Sly Fox, Escapist, Returning Prodigal, Golden Fly

What end do great men and great reputations serve? Each meets certain specific functions, depending on the era and place in which he lives; satisfies emotional and psychological needs of his admirers; and reflects commonly held hopes and beliefs. Public opinion, and hence reputations, change quickly. In one period there exists the tendency to dehumanize in order to exalt; in another, the hysteria of depreciation. Generally the expectations of the hero-seeking multitude is inordinately high. When disappointment follows, the victim is shunted off into limbo.

Of course, fallen heroes may rise again, for there are cycles in their popularity. In this century Washington is losing, and Lee gaining ground. The "ring-tailed roarers" of the last century's western frontier have gone into eclipse with the disappearance of that frontier. Reputations may see-saw with rivaling ones, as do Jefferson's and Hamilton's. This uneven evolution is by no means an exclusively American phenomenon.

Great men are more apt to be solid than subtle. Their aims are plainly put. They act while others think. Henry Adams, Charles Peirce, and Willard Gibbs have been America's intellectual giants. How many school children have even heard of them?

Eventually public idols are accepted and venerated on faith; their myth and their reality merge. They supersede mere facts. Every truth is a reshaping of life impressions. Hence, in the final analysis, it is a free creation of the human intellect. History's real bailiwick is not so much events as opinions. Most of us constantly overlook laws of evidence. We make what we would like to have happened into what did happen. To miss this point is to render the study of the heroic process impossible. "Who cares what the fact was," observed Emerson, "when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign?"

Thought is the alternation between collecting and interpretating data. But we believe many things that cannot be demonstrated, or fully documented. Some of these things we tag "legends." Legends can be more faithful and useful to the human heart than facts; many illustrations of this are contained in later chapters. Although scholars cannot endorse the notion that history is a pack of lies agreed upon, they realize there is truth in the quip about its being the propaganda of the victorious.

The reoccurrence of themes and traits in heroes has convinced some there is a magic formula. Joseph Campbell contends that all myths and worlds redeemed are alike. David Malcomson maintains that all heroes are contained in ten heroic types-namely, the Persevering Tortoise, Futile Searcher, Cinderella, Sly Fox, Escapist, Returning Prodigal, Golden Fly, Ugly Duckling, Patient Griselda, and Inconstant Lover. Other scholars have noted that six episodes are usually presented in Greek tragedy--the agon or struggle of hero and villain; the pathos or defeat of the hero; the description of death by a messenger; the lamentation; the recognition of the hero; and the theophany or insight which is the hero's epiphany.

In many Western European sagas the hero has a distinguished origin, and a birth surrounded by mysterious circumstances. Threats are made on his life, but he escapes and returns to win victories and fame. Tragedy, rather than comedy, dogs his life.

Undoubtedly, all heroes stand on somewhat common ground. The tall tales of America and the miracle tales of the Middle Ages have marked similarities. Comic books utilize situations as old as Homer or Beowulf. The favorite setting for heroes remains the battlefield, which provides the clearest test of strength and decision; but the testing ground may just as well be a country store, a lumber camp or the Yankee Stadium. Lincoln's walking miles to return a penny, Paul Bunyan's straightening out a river, and Babe Ruth's pointing to the bleachers where he intended to knock a home run are so many ways in which Americans have fulfilled their heroic roles.

World reputations swing between the poles of the saint (Buddha, Christ, St. Francis) and the soldier ( Alexander, Napoleon, Washington). The former stresses meekness, self-denial, renunciation; the latter aggressiveness, domination, and affirmation. Activistic America has honored the soldier more than the saint. The strong cult of individualism in America has affected our choice of heroes.

There is a difference between the eventful and the event-making man. The one is in the right place at the right time; anyone with a finger could have plugged the dike, as did the Dutch boy. Eventmaking people act so as to change existing conditions. Not everyone in Russia could have substituted for Lenin in the 1917 Revolution. Both types have a mission and acquire admirers. They are, in Thomas Carlyle's words, "the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators of whatsoever the general mass of men contrives to do or attain." To say they are always true to their age is not to say that their standard of values is ageless. "Reputations of the nineteenth century," said Emerson, "will one day be quoted to prove its barbarism."

Our heroes have become symbols, just as have Old Glory, the log cabin, and the skyscraper. Washington symbolizes the Revolution, Boone the Westward Trek, Lincoln the Restored Union, Lee the Lost Cause. Around them legends flourish--sometimes, as we shall see, involving supernatural power and insight. This situation emphasizes that, although they must have surface appeal, great men must also have large stores of inner power. "For behold," Jesus said, "the Kingdom of God is within you." The hero must turn within himself for the support and solutions he needs. Then, like the boonbringer, he can return to the outside world and aid those in it. The hero is a man first of self-achieved submission and then of action. His path is like that represented in the rites of passaage: separation, initiation, and return. This cycle is exemplified in the careers of Prometheus, Buddha, and Aeneas, as well as of many who have followed them.

The inward development of personality allows the hero to perform creative acts, and thus help human societies to grow. Before mastering the macrocosm he overcomes the microcosm. Tackling the outer world, he is faced by the inertia of his fellow-men; upsetting the social equilibrium inevitably brings conflict. Either his triumph or his defeat will restore the social equilibrium. As Henri Bergson says in The Creative Mind, the hero is one whose soul has marked the attainment of a certain point by the evolution of life, and has manifested in an original form a love which is the very essence of the creative effort.

Creative geniuses are "no more than a leaven in the lump of ordinary humanity; and this ordinary humanity is not different in nature from the human type which is typical of primitive societies." In trying to get the uncreative majority to follow him, the hero may use either force or mysticism. The mystic's soul passes out of action into ecstasy, then back into action again. This withdrawal-and-return is frequent in world mythology, as in the stories of Persephone, Adonis, and Osiris. It may be discerned in the spiritual life of mystics, the physical life of the vegetable kingdom, and in human speculation on immortality; in the lives of saints, statesmen, philosophers, and poets, as well as in the histories of nations.

Napoleon Bonaparte's empire has crumbled, his code is outmoded, but his legend survives. His own self-portrait of unblemished beauty fostered it. He did not hesitate to order the Pope to Paris for his coronation as Emperor in 1804. His appearance on battlefields was a masterpiece of heroic planning--the silhouette of the great general, on whom Fate hung, sitting on his charger. Wearing his two-cornered hat, he held the chart of the General Staff in one hand and a telescope in the other. He consciously shaped his reputation along lines that best satisfied him. French poets, patriots, and dramatists have done much to perpetuate the legend of Napoleon. An astute French historian has even demonstrated just how and why this has been done.

The most spectacular recent flare-up of hero-worship was occasioned by a woman in a relatively inconsequential nation: Eva Peron, first lady of Argentina. Born out of wedlock in a small provincial village, she was a dancer before marrying Juan Peron. As Secretary of Labor she developed and explained her "mission" so well that when in 1952 she died at 33, Argentina was thrown into despair. Business stopped, and even foreigners were required to go into mourning. A petition was cabled to the Pope in Rome asking for Eva's formal canonization. She had already become a saint at home, to be re-embalmed for "absolute corporeal permanence." Many walked across one or more provinces for a glimpse of the woman who spoke of herself as "just a sparrow in the midst of a great flock of sparrows." Churches displayed her picture in niches formerly reserved for the Virgin Mary. No one can study the "Evita" worship, even at a distance, without realizing its power as it swept over the Pampas.

Public creates the hero

As they did for so many things, the Greeks had a word for it-heros, the superior man, embodiment of composite ideals--first used in connection with the deified dead. The heros, or hero, had and has a reputation directly related to the social and political structure of his society. No one knows just when and why he comes. The gift of heaven, he is a force sent by destiny.

Different ages and cultures vary the heroic personality, but all heroes are true to their age. Whatever their situation, the motives they urge are elementary, the morality they advocate is obvious. History is not very effective without people, and people are ineffective without leaders. The search for heroes is inherent in human nature. Pre-literate societies allow men, heroes, and gods to stand on a footing of tolerable equality. In remote areas of the world men are still deified in their own lifetime. The idea of aloofness in super-human power comes late in history.

To the historian the hero is one who shapes the course of events; to the philosopher, one who alters the thinking of his times; to the folklorist, one who evokes legends and songs. Messiah, emancipator, founding father, preserver, creative genius: these are all related terms for one whose influence or personality captivates the people. The personification of predominating ideals, the hero emerges at a moment when men's emotions are deeply stirred, and appeals to both the imagination and the reason.

The flux of history is often compared to the course of a river. Like a stream, history moves in one direction for a time, then angles off in another. It gains momentum, washes away old banks, and makes unpredictable turns. This provides the hero with his golden moment. If he can convince others that he caused the turn, he will be a public idol.

Yet that public creates the hero only in the sense that a knight is made by the king when he gives the accolade. The reason for the accolade is independent of the king, and existed before the man became a knight. So a hero is created by public recognition of his worth; but the merit is independent of the recognition. Always susceptible to legend, a hero becomes superhistorical in myth.

His essential qualities are hard to identify and isolate. Each hero is emphatically himself. Many who temporarily qualify-political favorites, matinee idols, sports champions--disappear soon like a flash flood. While they last, however, they benefit from the maxim, "Winner take all." We quote and misquote them with equal ease. Erudite scholars find no indication that they said or did many things attributed to them. But they should have said and done them. That is enough.

In classical times heroes were god-men; in the Middle Ages they were God's men; in the Renaissance universal men; in the eighteenth century enlightened gentlemen; in the nineteenth century self-made men. In our own time we are seeing the common man become heroic.

All cultures invent, in some form or other, an Olympus like that of the imaginative Greeks. To this realm went certain human beings adjudged worthy of immortality. Such a one was Heracles, or, as the Romans called him, Hercules. Celebrated in sculpture by such artists as Myron, Scopas, Polyclitus, Praxiteles, and Lysippus, and worshipped in sacred shrines dotting the Hellenic world, this Heracles was actually a petty ruler in Tiryns, subject to the order of a superior king at Argos. To his known exploits the Greeks added mythical stories over the years. Finally he emerged as the embodiment of the Greek Happy Warrior, whose strength of will, social mission, friendship, and morality won universal praise. He became, as Socrates pointed out in the Gorgias, a figure that served the psychological needs of the Greeks.

When Athens rose to power she craved a hero of her own, more closely tied to her destiny than was Heracles; so Theseus was elevated. Previously he had ranked with, but not above, other heroes of pre-Trojan War days. In the Iliad he was a fighter and seducer, strong in battle "for rich-haired Helen's sake." Now the Athenians made him Ionian in spirit, fond of dancing and music. He became more circumspect in his love affairs. City officials deleted from Hesiod's works verses referring to Theseus' passion for Aegle. Pisistratus embarked on a deliberate campaign to glorify Theseus. In this he was followed by Cimon, who brought Theseus' bones to Athens from Scyros, buried them in the heart of the city, and formally established his cult. His popularity grew until it rivalled that of Heracles.

In time Theseus came to represent democratic Athens and its brilliant intellectual flowering. He figured prominently in plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. As the people matured, so did he, becoming more deliberate, lofty, and selfless. In contemplating him Athenians found courage and faith. Thucydides called him "a king of equal insight and power." On Hadrian's Arch was inscribed Athens, formerly the city of Theseus. The Athenians did not respect him because he was Theseus; he was Theseus because they respected him.

While Rome held sway many of the old gods declined, but new ones, and new religions, took hold. A pagan Olympus was supplanted by a Christian Heaven, where saints dwelt in glory ever. lasting. It is well to remember that in Christ's time, Messiahs could be found preaching on many street corners; but by the second century, with the martyrdom of Saint Polycarp, the method of Christian veneration had crystallized, and gained acceptance in a sizable portion of Europe.

The many saints' legends, which can be seen working in the same terms as primitive mythology, provide a primary source for studying the process of hero making. Saints perform generally the same heroic offices as did classical gods. They render the services of intercession and prediction, and provide the focus for relic worship and canonization. The last of these processes became an effective instrument for socializing the saintly idea and perpetuating the group values of the Church. In short, heroes got haloes.

Since the flowering of the saint, there has been a succession of occidental paragons. For the most part the modern hero has lost his ritualistic setting. The nearest contemporary approach is the awarding of military medals or special honors. While such secularized heroism does not appeal to as many as did the saintly heroism of the Middle Ages, it does dignify human action. The heroic ideal is still being met. Contemporary America is not so sophisticated, nor is the history of the United States so short that we can defy it. Ours, too, is the land of the hero.

Optimism, Pessimism, Realism

The optimist disregards the existence of painful reality or at least tries to improve the situation by steeping it in rosy colors. He is content with the present and confidently expects happiness and pleasure from the future. He clings to his early, infantile life of wish fulfillment. He cherishes the happy disposition of a contented child who knows that Mother will always be there and will take care of him as surely as the sun will shine again. For the realist it is again and again surprising -- and sometimes annoying -- to see how often the untiring optimist persuades or seduces reality to "come across," to be kind to him, to take over the role of Mother Fortune and smile kindly at him. Optimists live as if life offers them a drink or a breast to nurse from. They often look like satisfied babies. They are trusting children who expect some powerful mother to step forth in the future to feed them. "Everything will be all right" is their slogan. They are the noble characters who never learn from bad experience. They will smile when the realist frowns.

In analyzing them, a desperate depression often is found underneath the optimistic show of good cheer. They constantly belittle themselves and need the all-powerful mother to come to their rescue. They are almost psychotic in their unrealistic belief that they will settle all doubt and despair with faith and hope as their miracle. Their optimistic delusion may be a leftover from early life when the child does not distinguish between "I" and "you," the inner and outer worlds, but firmly believes in the omnipotence of his thoughts and wishes. The optimist gives the world a chance to repeat the miracle of the kind, life-giving mother. He re-creates the old childhood megalomania.

The humorist has chosen a more difficult and complicated assignment than the optimist who clings to an old childhood illusion come hell or high water. The humorist is similar to the depressive in so far as he resignedly accepts the fact that the good mother left him when he was expelled from the childhood paradise. But in contrast to the depressive, he does not spend his life in grief and mourning about the milk which was spilled a long time ago; he does something about it. He resolutely takes over the role of the good mother and himself plays it to the hilt for his own benefit. He is friendly and kind to himself and tries to develop a similarly tolerant and humorous attitude toward others. The grief over the loss of the good mother shows occasionally in the sadness of the humorist, who always seems to smile through tears.

The sense of humor or an optimistic attitude often develops in girls at a time when they are denying their fear of being sexually inferior to men and when they cannot accept the difference between boy and girl. Then they try to believe in miracles: What I do not have I may get later, in one form or another. The final and most favorable outcome of such castration anxiety in women may be the peculiar realism of the woman, closely akin to moderate realistic optimism and confidence. It represents a final working through to resigned acceptance: I have been castrated, nothing can happen to me any more, I am going to make the best of it.

In later life, especially after such women become mothers, they will see that their lot is not that of the castrate but that they have something which is possibly superior to anything a man has to offer. They once defended themselves against their castration anxiety with the optimistic feeling that nothing really bad could happen any more; they have been through it, and that is that. They actually have worked out a deeper and more important conflict than that connected with genital sexuality. They have finally come to a peaceful adjustment of the original conflict concerning their disappointment with their mothers, who, they felt, treated them unfairly compared with their brothers.

A woman's development is perhaps more difficult in our time than that of a man because of her repetition of the trauma of weaning and of losing the mother; having to leave the Garden of Eden in early childhood is repeated once more when the girl considers herself underprivileged if she compares her body with that of the boy. Old childhood fears are reactivated in the girl when bloody events like menstruation in puberty and later defloration seem to prove the reality of the threat of castration. The happy outcome of all these trials and tribulations in the development of the female is reached when the girl finally becomes a mother herself and develops in her relation toward her children a mature attitude toward herself and the mother within her. She has become by then a realist through her experience and a humorist through her love.

As a rule, and for good analytic reasons, women are both less optimistic and less pessimistic than men. They are much more realistic. They have faced reality, and after some struggle they have finally accepted it. It was not easy. Their mothers did not help much, but they finally reached the level of realistic adjustment by themselves (assuming that they are not among the great number who get stuck in neurosis or immaturity). Seemingly they accepted the male verdict that they were originally designed to be men but never made the grade and never received the mark of distinction.

Women are not more neurotic than men; they only show neurosis more clearly. Men can escape into business and work, which give them a convenient outlet for all kinds of neurotic tendencies. The woman's life revolves around human relationships, in which neurotic tendencies show up with pitiless, painful clarity.

The strangely realistic orientation of the woman shows best in little things. While a young man is still wondering how to go about kissing his girl for the first time, she has probably long been thinking about the linoleum in the kitchen after their marriage. When a woman drives her car through a red light and sees a policeman, he is for her just another man in uniform; the fact that she has broken a traffic rule may not change her reaction. If a man sees a policeman, he will react very differently. The policeman becomes, in the mind of the man, the image of all kinds of threats; his realistic function becomes negligible.

Men have trouble facing reality because it is so difficult for their unconscious to accept the fact that women seem to them simultaneously inferior and superior; that they do not have what men have and that they are still not castrated; that they have so little to show compared with men, yet so much to give; that they can create life, while men have relatively little to do with it. How do they do it?

Our primitive unconscious just does not allow us to see it. If we would let ourselves see it, we men would have to go a step further and admit the inferior creative role of the male, Mother Nature's afterthought. Where the woman creates new life, men try to satisfy their creativity in many lesser ways.

A woman needs illusion only until she recognizes her strength. She must face men in their silliness, in their competitiveness, in their defensiveness. To do that she needs a quiet superiority; in other words, she needs a sense of humor. She needs it to keep from laughing her head off at men.

Compared with woman's role in creating life, the man's role is that of a drone. He can never forget this, and he will always defend himself against this insight. The drone anxiety of the male is the reason why he must try to demonstrate a superiority he does not have. He must postulate and assume that the woman is envious of him, or, as a psychoanalyst would say, that the neurotic woman suffers from penis envy. The woman must overcome her shock at finding that the man, or the little boy, has something which she does not have, but she has a good chance to overcome this envy. Because of her creative superiority, the woman can serenely and smilingly accept her supposed inferiority; she knows better. Man has always been borne by her, and in his unconscious she will always represent his mother. Man will therefore fight for his freedom from her. She, however, will have an easier task. She will have to fight her mother less, because she may become a mother herself. Wit is his; humor is hers.

The mature woman smiles tolerantly and pretends to accept the male's false claim to superiority over her. She agrees to accept it because every time the man approaches her sexually she can show her superiority. She is always ready; he must get ready. She may watch, while he must perform. For the man the sexual act is a test, an examination, a performance. If the woman so chooses, she may watch the performance and still perform. The man needs cooperation; so to speak, he needs a helping hand. The man is dependent; either he can do it or he cannot do it. The woman is always potentially potent, the man is always potentially impotent. While the woman longs for intercourse, the man performs a kind of "extracourse." Where the man discovered love through sex, the woman discovered sex through love. These are the great differences between the sexes.

A sense of humor is a sign of maturity, a sign of sublimation, a sign of love. The woman has a greater chance to achieve her level of maturity than the man. Even though her part is more difficult, she gets there more frequently.

The young woman's calm, realistic self-reliance in contrast to the young man's tense, alert search for self-assurance were made strikingly clear to me a few years ago. In order to acquaint myself with normal young Americans and to compare the troubles and conflicts of late adolescence with the typical psychiatric problems of old age, I decided to join a group of college students who took long hikes under the sponsorship of their college. A teacher was in charge, and approximately ten young women and as many young men were participating. I tagged along as an interested observer. We passed a nudist camp on one of our hikes and quite naturally the conversation turned with some animation to nudism. When we were nearing the gates, I could not resist asking teasingly and testingly, "Why don't we visit the camp?" It was clearly understood that while we were in Rome we would have to do as the Romans did. After some discussion a vote was taken, and all the girls -- unanimously! -- voted in favor of a visit. All the boys -- just as unanimously! -- voted against it. We continued on our hike around the camp and into the mountains.

I must add here an embarrassing confession. I had worked for almost thirty years in psychiatry and psychoanalysis and considered myself as qualified and experienced, intuitive and understanding an analyst as they come. But I was completely baffled by this vote and behavior. The unanimous vote, the clear-cut line of separation between the sexes, even the No of the boys instead of acceptance of an adventure, was unexpected and inexplicable to me for a long time. The daring readiness of the young women was also a surprise. At that time I did not know that a woman feels most innocent when she is daring. I realized only later that a woman has little to hide in such an experiment; that she is protected by nature in the role of onlooker, while all men react on such an occasion as if they are taking a test which is highly unfair and one in which they can only fail.