The machinery of the heroic legend is all there, for poets and orators to use, but our approach to it is often hesitating and embarrassed; or else, in the old way of Americans, we hide our lack of self-confidence in bluster, and are entirely too positive.
Men have never found it easy to agree within the rational plane, and Americans will never be at peace with their heroes if they have the additional perplexity of being forced to choose between ideas and emotions, with no privilege of combinations allowed.
Heroes without glory / God without thunder - the debunking biography assures us that the noble severity of George Washington's countenance ought to be attributed to his discomfort in wearing false teeth.
Evidently Mr. Hendrick is a devout believer in the Lincoln myth, which for him is sublimated into a national myth. Involuntarily, quite without realizing what he is doing, he recognizes the power and dignity of the hostile Southern myth, and he would dispose of it by absorbing it and declining to treat it as hostile. In so doing he ceases to write history; he becomes a myth maker. The action is very instructive. For while Mr. Hendrick has earlier as a thorough Modernist in his attitude toward myth, he would exempt his own myth, and be strongly Fundamentalist toward it. It is as if a Mohammedan should argue against the deity of Jesus on the ground that the Virgin Birth is a logically untenable and "antiquarian" idea, and then turn around and accept Jesus if Christians will call him a Moslem.
If now a Southerner- whose mind may also be divided, yet is likely to be less grievously divided than Mr. Hendrick's - should turn this historian's weapons upon him, the argument would run like this. On purely matter-of-fact grounds, what prevents the Lincoln myth from being regarded as also a charming, antiquarian interlude? The Lincoln idea, too, has had to yield to a changed America and may be gone forever. The Union that Lincoln is said to have wanted to reestablish was never really set up. If Lincoln was a supporter, as in a dim way he may have been, of the Jeffersonian notion of a body of free and self-reliant farmers as the bulwark of the nation, then why did he fight the South? Lincoln made war upon his own idea, and the fruit of his victory, represented in sprawling, confused, industrial America, is a more pitiful sight than the desolate Lee plantations, for it is hardly even a noble ruin. However effective it may have been as a war measure, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was an inept bit of civil statesmanship...
By letting himself be used as the idealistic front for the material designs of the North, Lincoln not only ruined the South but quite conceivably ruined the North as well; and if Fascism or Communism ever arrives in America, Lincoln will have been a remote but efficient cause of its appearance...
Then with kindling emotion the Southerner might go on, prompted to declare where his own myth is involved and add that nothing could be more ironic, or perhaps more tragic, than to have Arlington made into a "national shrine," or to have the Lincoln memorial "the object mainly in view" from the porch where Robert E. Lee once stood. And by what sort of an act, too, did Arlington pass into the hands of the Federal government in the first place?
As the Southerner reflects, his indignation is likely to rise to a point where he cannot with any comfort visit the old mansion of Arlington. In no case will he be likely to agree that the beautiful new bridge joins Lee and Lincoln in "spiritual" union. He may possibly consider the near presence of the Lincoln Memorial an affront which must be tolerated but cannot be enjoyed. To the sons of Confederates it is a reminder of tragedy, not an emblem of exaltation...
We have progressed or degenerated from a time when a man could be Father of his country to a time when we are the Babies of the State.
Yet it would not be far from the truth to say that the founding fathers, and Jefferson with them, are becoming more and more figures in a book, understandable enough there, but hardly to be conceived as appearing like a Theseus to aid us against the Persians of some national crisis.
Andrew Jackson represents the Western idea of the American national tradition, which is "to be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell."
The East laughs at the Andrew Jacksons of the West, patronizes or snubs them, and, if they grow powerful, it raises the cry of "demagogue"...The West retaliates by a complete insensitivity to the leadership of the Adams family.
But Sherman will not soon be memorialized in Georgia. The proposal that his route to the sea be indicated by markers was scornfully rejected by the Deep South.
To be an American hero, a man must be a sectional hero; but no true sectional hero can be a true, or complete, national hero.
Theoretically, the only kind of really national hero we can have ought to be a hero who embodies the Federal conception. But that sphere is too abstract for a hero to thrive in it. Heroics there are dangerous to the principle of equilibrium which is vital to the American conception of the nation. The Federal sphere will accommodate the statesman, but not the hero, in the epical and tremendous sense...
On the other hand, the sections, which embody culturally related groups of states and have approximate unity of feeling, are the true home of the particular and definite characteristics out of which arises the grand type, the hero. The sections, and within them the localities, are the true mothers of heroes, and our problem is how to venerate our heroes without disturbing the national equilibrium.
But if the heroes are dead and thus about to enter the realm of myth, we may witness a curious sort of adjustment. The Northerner may attempt to annex the Southern hero, by distilling out of him most of his sectional essence.
The biggest danger is for the sectionalist who denies his own myth and takes up the myth of another section.
It is hard to contemplate with any great respect a surrender of native myth when it has the flavor of being done in bald accordance with self-interest only. If a Southerner who is not of Unionist and Republican antecedents whole-heartedly adopts the Northern myth of Lincoln, he is naturally suspected of having an axe to grind, and generally he does. He is likely to be a "progressive" Southerner, out for all the national improvement of the Northern model that he can secure.
In the field of myth, where regard ceases to be Platonic and becomes really warm, the heroes turn out to be sectional, and their sectional particularity is too recognizable for them to be taken over where they are not understood and do not belong.
On what terms, then, do we have our American heroes? Let the crystal gazer who can peer into the hidden unity of American character give a simple answer if he dare. To those who are not crystal-gazers, a complex and guarded answer seems wise. Let us beware how we nationalize the sectional hero or sectionalize the national hero. If we are to have any national heroes at all, they are best let alone in the entirely secular sphere, where, when admired, they will secure a Platonic admiration suitable to the highly abstract device by which the nation was originally put together. And the sacred sphere, where passionate devotion has a right to reign, not too closely queried by the cold instruments of pure history, is reserved for the sectional heroes in whose images we know our better, our wished for selves. We govern best in the first sphere; but we best build shrines in the second.
-Donald Davidson
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