Peter H Gibbon - A Call to Heroism: Renewing Americas Vision of Greatness

With a Foreword by Peter J. Gomes

Copyright 2002 by Peter H. Gibbon
Foreword copyright 2002 by Peter J. Gomes

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Photo Creditspage 14. Photo courtesy of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans on the campus of Bronx Community College of the City University of New York. page 36. Statue of John Bridge, Puritan, on Cambridge Common, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photo by Mark Meatto. page 52. The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston Common, Boston, Massachusetts. Photo courtesy The Bostonian Society/Old State House. page 70. Sports Bay Chapel Window, The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, New York City. Photo by Gregory Thorp. page 86. Detail of statue of George Washington. Horatio Greenough (18051852). Photo: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY. page 102. Bust of Benjamin Franklin. Jean-Antoine Houdon, French (active Paris), 17411828. Purchased with funds from the Barra Foundation, Inc., the Henry P. McIlhenny Fund in memory of Frances P. McIlhenny, with funds bequeathed by Walter E. Stait, the Fiske Kimball Fund, The Womens Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and with funds contributed by individual donors to the Fund for Franklin in honor of the 125th Anniversary of the Museum. page 116. View of Mount Rushmore. Photo by South Dakota Tourism. page 138. Martha Berrys school at Possum Trot. Photo courtesy of Berry College, Mount Berry, Georgia.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

GIBBON; PETER HAZEN, 1942-

A CALL TO HEROISM: RENEWING AMERICAS VISION OF GREATNESS/PETER H. GIBBON; WITH A FOREWORD BY PETER J. GOMES.

P CM.

eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9856-3

1. NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS, AMERICAN. 2. HEROESMYTHOLOGYUNITED STATES. 3. HEROESUNITED STATESBIOGRAPHY. 4. IDEALISM, AMERICAN. 5. IDEALISMSOCIAL ASPECTSUNITED STATES. 6. UNITED STATESCIVILIZATION. 7. NATIONAL MONUMENTSUNITED STATES. I. TITLE.

E169. 1 .G473 2002
920.02DC21

2001056497

Design by Laura Hammond Hough

Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

To Carol

Sherwin B. Nuland, 1988
Doctors: The Biography of Medicine

The Greeks tell us that people are known by the heroes they crown. If the Greeks are right, and they usually are, then a discussion about heroes and heroism is essentially an exercise in self-discovery and cultural introspection; and in choosing to honor certain persons as heroes and certain actions as heroic, we invest those persons and actions with ideals that we ourselves value and admire. Admiration and emulation are the qualities that heroes inspire. In the tradition of the hero, the qualities to be admired usually came down from on high, literally from Olympus, the mount upon which the gods of antiquity dwelt. Thus, literally, a hero was someone to be looked up to, someone to be observed from afar, who was, in fact, larger than life. In Greek mythology, a hero was the offspring of one mortal parent and one immortal parent, and this remarkable parentage accounted for the personality disorders and consequent struggles characteristic of those men and women who were made famous by Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey (Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought; ed. Kenneth McLeish; London, 1993; p. 343). The dilemma of a person of a split and warring nature set to persevering struggle in an impossible task, who nevertheless both overcomes the obstacles and accomplishes the desired end against all odds, is the classic formula of the hero. The Homeric gods and heroes were not themselves exclusively exemplary figures: their passions and their pettinesses contended with their admirable qualities and made them recognizable to their fully human and thus more limited observers.

Thus, Plato, in constructing the ideal curriculum for his Republic, has Socrates excise Homer from the reading list because the gods are immoral and thus not fit for the emulation of the young. To Plato, the Homeric gods, heroes, and myths are the stuff not of history but of poetry, and hence in Book X of the Republic, the poets who publish and perpetuate these tales are subversive to the state and deserved to be both thrashed and banished. It would be first the Romans and then the Christians who would rescue the concept of the hero from the reaches of poetic fiction and place it at the disposal of history and morality. In the Roman tradition Plutarch, in his biographies, leaves poetrywith its propensity to myth and fictionand historywith its propensity for battles and what he calls the slanders of the great historian Herodotusfor biography, or lives. The lives he calls paradiegmata, which means patterns, models, paradigms. In one of his introductions, Plutarch writes:

I beg my readers not to hold it against me if I have not managed to work in every single one of the famous acts reported of these men, but rather have cut most of them short. The reason is that I am writing Lives not Histories, and the revelation of excellence or baseness does not always occur in the most conspicuous acts. Rather, some little thing, a witticism or a joke, often displays a mans character more clearly than battles with thousands of casualties, huge military formations, or sieges of cities. (Robert Lamberton; Plutarch; Yale University Press, 2001; p. 71)

Plutarch writes for the young that they may have examples of exemplary lives from antiquity to guide them in the present for the future. The purpose of biography is moral; the lives of the great and the good are meant to make the reader better. The proof of admiration is emulation, and even negative examples are exemplum of what to avoid, what not to do.

Such a purpose is not far removed from the Judeo-Christian tradition, a world seemingly antithetic to the Greco-Roman concept of the hero. In the Hebrew Bible, whose written text is the artifact of a much earlier oral culture, we find the stories of great-souled people who did great deeds: greatness in the Hebrew Bible is always defined in terms of efforts to be faithful to the commandments of God. Psalm 78 is but one example of the singing of the heroically faithful:

Give ear, O my people, to my teaching; incline your ears to the words of my mouth! I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings from of old, things that we have heard and known, that our fathers have told us. We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might, and the wonders which he has wrought. Psalm 78:14 (RSV)