There are no heroes (only people who sometimes do heroic things)

The 8th law of history

Some years ago I was on a book tour promoting a biography of Andrew Jackson. The event this day was a luncheon for booksellers, a common venue in which authors table-hop among retailers, pitching their latest in six-minute bursts. A chronic hazard is instant déjà vu; by the third or fourth round of this speed-dating exercise I found it impossible to tell whether I was repeating myself to this table, or just repeating myself from the tables before. On the whole, though, it was good fun among people who share a fondness for books. And all the booksellers went home with free copies of the books they’d heard about, signed by the authors.

Or almost all. I knew when I chose to write about Jackson that he’s less popular than he used to be. The campaign to expunge his image from the twenty-dollar bill had recently heated up again, stalled only by the efforts of Bill Frist, then majority leader in the Senate and a proud Tennessean. But controversy is embedded in history, and anyway, I thought, a ruckus can be good for sales.

Even so, I was curious at the frown on the face of one bookseller who stood in the line to receive a copy of my book. He seemed to be making a point to let everyone else go first, as though to have me to himself as the room cleared out. He appeared in marked contrast to the rest of the crowd; bookselling isn’t a lucrative profession, and the other attendees appeared uniformly delighted to be going home with free books.

He drew closer and closer, and his face registered no improvement in his mood. Finally, as I finished signing the last of the books for his happy comrades, he leaned forward and down—I was sitting—until his nose was barely a foot from my own, and hissed: “I hope you don’t admire Andrew Jackson!”

I was taken aback. I’m not famous enough, or enough the controversialist, to draw many people who really dislike what I do. I’m sure there are such people, but they don’t bother to come to my events. Sometimes they write or email me, but even that doesn’t happen very often. They save their energy for other things. But this fellow was clearly upset that I had written about Jackson, and that I might admire the man. He seemed to think I did; otherwise why would I have written a whole book about him?

It was a reasonable supposition. It’s fair to say most biographers do admire their subjects. I once interviewed David McCullough about his writing, and he explained that his then-new biography of John Adams had originally been intended as a dual biography of Thomas Jefferson and Adams, but he found Adams to be the more engaging and admirable character. I had read the Adams biography, as well as McCullough’s previous biography of Harry Truman; in both cases the author’s admiration for his subjects was obvious. I asked him if he would ever write a biography of someone he didn’t admire. The question seemed to strike him as odd. “Why would I do that?” he said.

So I knew where my angry interrogator was coming from. I was tempted to say, “Read my book and find out.” I started to hand him his copy. He brushed it aside. “I don’t want your book,” he said. He didn’t want to have anything to do with Jackson. But he did want an answer to his question, or challenge.

I gave it to him. Slowly and deliberately, I said, “I admire Andrew Jackson’s . . . admirable qualities.”

His face got redder. He seemed to think I was mocking him, or dodging his question. He turned abruptly and stalked off, leaving me holding the book he was supposed to receive.

I wasn’t mocking him. He had asked a serious question, and I gave him a serious answer, even if it sounded flippant. In fact, despite being something of a tautology, it was the most accurate answer I could have given. I know he wanted a categorical answer—Jackson as hero or Jackson as villain. Very many—perhaps most—people do. But I wasn’t going to give him one, because I couldn’t do so honestly. Jackson was neither hero nor villain. He had his good moments and his bad. Just like the rest of us.

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Heroes come in various sorts. Religious heroes are saints or prophets. Sports heroes are trophied champions. Military heroes receive medals, statues and, in the United States, the presidency. Heroes serve as role models; parents point to heroes and tell their children to grow up to be like them.

Heroes come and go; they have their celebrity and then are exchanged for newer versions. Of American heroes, those with the longest run are the group collectively known as the Founding Fathers. They were all men—though such wives as Abigail Adams and Dolley Madison served as important auxiliaries—and they did indeed found the American republic. They declared independence from Britain and vindicated their declaration on the battlefield. They wrote the Constitution under which Americans have lived since 1789, and they launched the government the Constitution created.

Yet they weren’t heroes from the start, not to all Americans by any means. In their fight for American independence they were opposed by American Loyalists, who fought against independence and deemed the likes of Washington, Franklin and John Adams to be traitors. The founders who wrote the Constitution and campaigned for its ratification were opposed by other founders who judged the new charter a step back toward the kind of centralist rule overthrown in the revolution. The split extended into the early national period, when the factions congealed into parties bitterly opposed to each other.

The reputation of the founders didn’t improve during their lifetimes. Washington could have been president for life, but he abandoned his office after two terms under criticism the likes of which he had never imagined. Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who had served together on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, fell out with each other in the struggle to succeed Washington. Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, who both had been wounded fighting for independence, fought against each other, with Burr killing Hamilton in a duel.

The death of the founders, one by one, removed them from the line of political fire, prompting their critics to target the founders’ handiwork. The Constitution took a beating for sheltering slavery either excessively or insufficiently, depending on the critic’s view of slavery. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison made his displeasure plain by burning a copy of the Constitution, which he denounced as a “covenant with death” and an “agreement with hell.”

It wasn’t until after the Civil War that the cult of the founders emerged. The timing wasn’t accidental. The 1876 centenary of independence put Americans in a nostalgic mood; more to the point, a decade after Appomattox, both political parties sought to move beyond the sectional differences that had obsessed the country for two generations. What could they honor and cherish in common? The founding of the republic, of course. Moreover, the Confederate defeat having discredited states’-rights fundamentalism, the nationalism that had produced the Constitution appealed to the rising capitalist class in the industrial North. So the founders were placed on pedestals, and their chief contribution to the applied theory of government, the Constitution, was treated as holy writ.

They had a good long run. Not for another century did the founders’ tolerance of slavery dent their popularity, and even then the damage was felt primarily among the most liberally fastidious. The keepers of the flame rejected contrary evidence; until DNA findings made their position untenable, acolytes of Jefferson rejected what had been common knowledge around Monticello during Marse Tom’s lifetime: that he had fathered children by slave Sally Hemings. To the surprise of the holdouts, admission that Jefferson wasn’t the celibate widower made him not less popular but more so: a founder who was mortal!

Strikingly, while liberals were chipping away at the founders themselves, conservatives were further enshrining their handiwork. “Originalist” interpretations of the Constitution sought to base modern rulings on the meaning of the Constitution to the men who drafted and ratified it in the 1780s. There were numerous problems with this approach, starting with the historical fact that the framers had disagreed among themselves on what the Constitution meant. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, the prime movers behind the Constitutional convention of 1787, and the authors of most of the pro-ratification Federalist Papers, disagreed sharply over whether the Constitution authorized a national bank, for example.

The other problem with originalism was that it reflected the eighteenth-century world in which the Constitution was drafted, but was being applied to the world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Constitution, as written, authorizes Congress to “coin” money but not to print money. Paper money wasn’t unheard-of in the 1780s; clearly the framers chose not to give Congress the power to print the stuff. But the American economy in the founders’ time wasn’t so big as to make coin money insufficient for most needs. Long before the twenty-first century, coins had become petty change; paper was required. What was an originalist to do? In fact, what they did do was apply their theory selectively, thereby undermining the whole project.

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There are two problems with heroes. The first is that they disappoint; the second is that they infantilize.

Disappointment comes as soon as historians or others take a close and honest look at the heroes’ lives. No one is a hero full-time. Jefferson fathered children by a woman to whom he wasn’t married. George Washington was a stern slaveowner, ordering troublesome servants whipped. He was no less stern toward white indentured servants. Alexander Hamilton cheated on his wife and paid blackmail to keep the affair quiet. Daniel Webster took money from the Bank of the United States even as he argued the bank’s case before the Senate. Abraham Lincoln suffered from chronic depression. John Kennedy hid his multiple ailments and more numerous girlfriends from voters. When we treat heroes as members of a human category different from ourselves, we can’t help being disillusioned when they sometimes act as badly as we do.

And if no one is a hero all the time, neither is anyone a hero for all time. George Washington cultivated an air of unapproachability, which served his purposes in an era that expected deference of lesser beings to their betters. But it makes him seem a prig in our democratic age. In truth, it sometimes made him seem a prig in his own day. Gouverneur Morris, the most fun-loving of the founders, related a story about Washington. “I was at the president’s last night; several members of the cabinet were there,” Morris told a friend the next day. “The president was standing with his arms behind him, his usual position, his back to the fire, listening. Hamilton made a speech I did not like. I started up and spoke, stamping, as I walked up and down, with my wooden leg. And as I was certain I had the best of the argument, as I finished I stalked up to the president, slapped him on the back and said, ‘Ain’t I right, General?” Washington transfixed Morris with a disdainful glare. “Oh, his look!” Morris said. “How I wished the floor would open and I could descend to the cellar! You know me, and you know my eye would never quail before any other mortal!”

Andrew Jackson was a better fit than Washington for the age of democracy—the Age of Jackson, as it was often called. Old Hickory was the common man made good, one the most humble of backcountry folk could identify with. Jackson was enormously popular during most of the nineteenth century; he was the model of what a Democratic president should be all the way into the 1930s, when he was replaced by Franklin Roosevelt. Jackson’s contemporaries knew he was an Indian fighter and a slaveholder, but far from holding those roles against him, they valued him more for them. Most Americans in the nineteenth century agreed with Jackson that Indians and whites couldn’t live together in peace, and most took the side of whites. Jackson had his critics, to be sure, but on the Indian question the critics—typically Easterners, with no personal experience of life on the frontier—were outnumbered and largely ignored.

In time, which is to say by about the 1960s, Jackson’s Indian policy fell out of favor, and what he was praised for in his own lifetime, he was condemned for by posterity. Again, opinion wasn’t uniform; liberals, Jackson’s constituency in life, criticized him far more stridently than did conservatives, his opponents in life. I can’t say for certain that the bookseller who disdained a free copy of my Jackson book was a liberal, but he probably was. He doubtless disliked Jackson’s Indian policy and, by the evidence of his flushed face, most other things about Jackson. In Jackson’s own day he was often referred to simply as “the Hero”; thousands of male children were named Andrew Jackson Smith, Andrew Jackson Jones and so on. In our day his name more often evokes embarrassment and revulsion than admiration.

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The second problem with heroes—the problem of our self-infantilization—is more serious. When we put a Washington or a Jackson on a pedestal, literally or figuratively, we excuse ourselves from responsibility for attempting the great things they accomplished. They are up there; we are down here. How can we be expected to do anything approaching what they did?

The cult of the Constitution is a prime example of this. At the time of its writing, the population of the United States was less than that of modern Chicago. And yet we behave as though we lack the collective genius of the framers, despite commanding a talent pool a hundred times the size of the one that staffed the Philadelphia convention. We hear the constant refrain that our democracy is broken, and yet we don’t seriously try to fix it. The framers gave the Articles of Confederation scarcely five years before they tore up that document and started over. We’ve been complaining about the gridlock and unresponsiveness of our government for decades, and all we can muster are efforts to adjust the margins. Critics of the electoral college don’t even bother attempting the most straightforward fix: an amendment to the Constitution. Instead they plot an end run through the states.

Madison and Hamilton would be ashamed. They and their fellow founders didn’t have difficulty admitting the flaws in their handiwork. The ink on the original document was hardly dry before Madison himself wrote twelve amendments, of which ten were approved as the Bill of Rights. Two more were added shortly, including the lengthy Twelfth Amendment, which fixed the mess the original procedure for electing presidents caused in 1800, when the party repudiated by the voters determined which of its opponents would win.

But after the founders departed the earth, amendments became rare. The Civil War triggered three, to end slavery and give rights to the freedmen. The Progressive era of the early twentieth century yielded four more, including one—on prohibition of alcohol—that was undone fifteen years later. Subsequent amendments were largely procedural rather than substantive.

No one would claim that the twenty-seven amendments have perfected the Constitution. Far from it. The Second Amendment is a prime example of a part of the Constitution everyone complains about. Advocates of gun control would like to repeal it; opponents of gun control would strengthen it by deleting the introductory clause about militias. But no one seriously works toward changing it. Part of this reluctance is cynically political: the National Rifle Association would lose its ability to scare up donations if it conclusively won the debate by eliminating the militia clause. (In the same way, the Sierra Club benefits when anti-environmentalists gain power in Washington. James Watt, a rabid anti-environmentalist who became Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the interior, was one of the most effective fundraisers for the Sierra Club in the organization’s history.)

But the larger reason for reluctance to amend the Constitution is the undue reverence for the people who wrote it. Every amendment so far has been by first of the two methods specified in Article Five, with Congress proposing amendments and states ratifying them. The second method, in which the states call a convention for proposing amendments, has never been employed. Even the thought of such a convention sends shivers down the spines of respectable commentators on American politics, who conjure the image of a “runaway convention” to frighten everyone else. When it is pointed out that the Philadelphia convention of 1787 was just such a runaway, we are made to believe that the founders could handle the responsibility but we cannot.

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Not all heroes are created equally, and not all heroically. Texas, which loves its heroes as much as any state, has a neat way of dealing with this discrepancy. Stephen Austin and Sam Houston receive the standard hero treatment, having been pretty much model citizens their whole lives, except for an epic bender by Houston after his first wife left him just weeks after their wedding. But other Texas heroes came late to heroism. These include some of the doomed defenders of the Alamo, which is, under Texas law, a shrine to their memory.

Not even the most ardent Texas patriot would offer the pre-Texas lives of William Barret Travis and James Bowie, the leaders of Alamo garrison, for emulation. Travis abandoned his pregnant wife to emigrate to Texas, at that time part of Mexico; once in Texas he frenetically slept with every woman he could lay hands on, and kept a journal recounting his conquests. Bowie traveled to Texas to escape arrest for land fraud and illegal slave-trading in Louisiana; like numerous other American emigrants to Texas, Bowie appreciated the lack of an extradition treaty between Mexico and the United States. So many of the Americans were fleeing monetary obligations that bill collectors back home devised a shorthand for a certain large class of uncollectible debt: GTT, for “Gone to Texas.” Davy Crockett wasn’t a scoundrel when he left Tennessee for Texas, merely a loser. Following an unsuccessful race for reelection to Congress, Crockett cursed the ingratitude of his constituents and declared, “You all can go to hell; I’m going to Texas.”

Yet if Travis, Bowie and Crockett weren’t heroes when they arrived at the Alamo, they became heroes there. On the early morning of March 6, 1836, they and some two hundred other defenders of the Alamo stoutly resisted an attack by many times their number of Mexican troops. The battle raged until the sheer weight of the Mexican forces overwhelmed the defenders. The Mexican commander, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, ordered that no prisoners be taken, and the Texans were killed to the last man.

Almost at once, the checkered backgrounds of Travis and Bowie were forgotten. The Alamo became the Thermopylae of the Texas revolution; the delaying action of Travis and the others, it was said, bought time for Sam Houston and the rest of the Texas army to gird themselves against Santa Anna, whom they defeated six weeks later. The course of events was in fact more complicated than that, but the Alamo had already entered myth. And Travis and Bowie, and Crockett and the other slain defenders, entered the pantheon of Texas heroes, all for a brave morning’s work.

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Saint Augustine of Hippo, the great Catholic theologian, might seem an unlikely counterpart to William Travis. But the two have something important in common. Augustine was, by his own confession, as lost a sinner as ever walked the earth, fully the equal, in this dubious regard, of Travis. Augustine, moreover, played games with God, beseeching, “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.” And in the end Augustine, like Travis, was saved.

Augustine credited God’s grace; Travis depended on his own courage and the charity of the Texans who survived him. Yet each drew on the power of forgiveness. Augustine’s Catholic church formalized forgiveness in the sacrament of confession (or reconciliation), which washed away sin and put one right with God. In Catholic teaching a thoroughly wretched life could be salvaged at the moment of death if the sinner did one good thing—repent—before dying.

Interestingly, a chief complaint of the Americans who emigrated to Mexican Texas was that they were required by Mexican law to be baptized into the Roman Catholic church. The great majority of the Americans were Protestants, and most ignored or flouted the law whenever possible. Yet a secular equivalent of the Catholic doctrine of forgiveness was what enabled Travis and Bowie to become secular saints—heroes—to generations of Texans. In their last act they behaved heroically, and all their previous sins were forgiven. It’s probably a good thing for their historical reputations that Travis and Bowie died at the Alamo; had they lived, they likely would have reverted to their previous unheroic behavior. But they did die, and all that was remembered was their glorious final hour.

Their experience might or might not offer a lesson to would-be heroes. Yes, doing a brave thing in one’s last hour is commendable, but we probably shouldn’t count on receiving such a timely opportunity. Travis and Bowie didn’t ride to the Alamo intending to die there; they expected to defeat Santa Anna and return to their previous habits. Likewise Augustine asking God to indulge him for a few more rounds of the wild life; he might have fallen into a well and died before becoming chaste.

But the Alamo has a lesson for would-be hero-worshippers. Don’t expect your heroes to be models of good behavior all the time. Accept that they are ordinary people who happen to do some things worth celebrating or emulating. Focus on those, and forgive the rest. Otherwise you’ll certainly be disappointed.

Meanwhile don’t sell yourself short. They weren’t that different from you.

For more on Brands’s laws of history: https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/the-laws-of-history-165