Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 19, 1991 TAG: 9103190152
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ANNE C. ROARK/ LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Long
Not that he ever doubted the integrity of the legendary child psychologist. What struck the 78-year-old Viennese-born psychoanalyst was the seemingly inexorable need of Americans to diminish the great thinkers and leaders of their society.
"For some reason in this country, we have the need to tear down idols and heroes," Ekstein said in his office here. "In Europe, we build monuments to great men when they die. Here, we try so very hard to find out what they did wrong while they were alive."
Countless Americans who approached hero status in life have fallen prey to excruciating examination after their deaths: Thomas Jefferson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Sinclair Lewis, H.L. Mencken, Elvis Presley, Martin Luther King Jr.
Fueled by incessant probing from scholars, an almost prurient curiosity within the media and a growing public cynicism, the nation seems preoccupied with the flaws of the famous.
Has hero bashing become a national pastime?
"It does seem to be [on the rise]," said Studs Terkel, author of "American Dreams: Lost and Found," "Hard Times" and other books on the American character.
"The problem is we [Americans] don't know who our heroes are," Terkel said. With some exceptions - King being the most notable - "look at who we name our streets after: politicians, heads of corporations and big-shot industrialists. Look at the streets of Paris. They are named for Victor Hugo, artists, sculptors, creative spirits."
Moreover, those who are anointed as America's heroes have often been given far more credit than they probably deserve, which is precisely what gets them - and those who criticize them - into so much trouble, said writer and editor Philip Terzian.
"I don't think we have any national pathology for vilifying heroes," said Terzian, editorial page editor of the Providence (R.I.) Journal. "What we do tend to do is be naive about heroes. We invest them with far too much greatness. We make them into superhuman figures. Then when we find out they were after all only human - when we discover they had flaws - we are devastated."
Witness revelations that two of America's great presidents, Kennedy and Roosevelt, were philanderers; that another, Jefferson, had illegitimate children.
Consider the effect that biographies have had on the reputations of some of America's literary and cultural heroes: Mencken has come to be thought of as a racist and anti-Semite for his newspaper writings, despite his actions in support of blacks and Jews. Lewis, the author of "Main Street" and the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature, has come to be remembered as an obnoxious, belligerent alcoholic who mistreated his family and abused his colleagues rather than as a great chronicler of the American character. Presley has come to be remembered more for his drug addiction and his decadent lifestyle than for his music.
Perhaps the most troubling discovery came just four months ago, when a Stanford University history professor announced that King, the nation's most revered civil rights leader, had plagiarized another student's work in his doctoral thesis and other graduate writings at Boston University in the 1950s.
And this winter, a University of California, Berkeley, professor has made a similar accusation against Bettelheim, an American leader in the field of child psychology.
In his 1976 book, "The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales," Bettelheim had made unattributed use of "A Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales: Their Origin, Meaning and Usefulness," a 1963 book by Stanford University psychiatrist Julius E. Heuscher, according to Alan Dundes, a Berkeley folklore expert.
Like the King discovery, which followed disclosures of the civil rights leader's alleged extramarital affairs, the charge against Bettelheim followed allegations by former patients that he was physically abusive to young patients at the University of Chicago's Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, where he was director for nearly 30 years.
Such disclosures have caused some Americans to wonder whether their society has become obsessed with human flaws and deficiencies. Experts are pondering whether Americans have lost pride in their intellectual, artistic and political leaders. And they are attempting to define whether it is the function of scholars and critics to keep the citizens of a democracy skeptical of their leaders.
In one sense, many observers say, Americans have always been uneasy about their cultural and political leaders, simply because they have never been ruled by a monarchy. In a democracy founded on the notion that all men are created equal, there is little room for hero worship.
Even less room has existed since JFK's assassination, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Nixon. Many scholars pointed out that Kennedy's death was a turning point for many Americans, a graphic end to an era of innocence.
The tendency to be "critical and skeptical" is part of not only "our distant past but our more recent past as well," said historian Arthur Schlesinger.
The power and immediacy of the modern media have fueled the latest shift to a less-romanticized view of heroes, observers say. Although few in the 1930s knew that FDR's legs were paralyzed, for example, most Americans in the 1980s knew not only that then-President Reagan had colon cancer and skin cancer but also knew graphic details of his treatment.
In many cases, the things said about public figures today would have been unthinkable a generation ago - or even a decade ago. First lady Mamie Eisenhower's alleged drinking problems, for instance, were hushed up during her lifetime, while Betty Ford's alcoholism became a national cause celebre shortly after her husband left the White House.
Another reason for the country's seeming preoccupation with debunking its heroes may have to do with the American judicial system: Under U.S. law, you cannot libel the dead.
In his 1986 book, "Suing the Press," Rodney A. Smolla wrote that a biographer or scholar who discloses unflattering facts or allegations cannot be held financially responsible if they besmirch reputation after a person's death, which is not the case before a person's death.
Many Americans are unmoved by charges that the nation's greatest thinkers and creators may have behaved less than honorably, either in private or public life.
"So what?" said Henry Steele Commager, professor emeritus at Amherst College and author of "The American Mind" and numerous other books on U.S. history and culture. "What difference does it make? Their accomplishments still stand. Their minds worked just the same."
Hero bashing, said Nathan M. Szajnberg, a Connecticut psychiatrist and a former student of Bettelheim, is "deeply embedded in the American psyche" and is related to the relative youth of the nation.
Like Terzian, Szajnberg believes that Americans tend to make "too much of the people we admire."
He wrote in a recent editorial in The Hartford Courant: "Did John F. Kennedy sleep with Marilyn Monroe? Did Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarize another's doctoral thesis? Did Simone de Beauvoir serve as Jean-Paul Sartre's handmaiden? By dwelling on alleged human weaknesses, we absolve ourselves from feeling that we need to live up to their greatness."
"In letting ourselves off the hook," he said in an interview, "it means we don't have to live up to JFK's ideas for a better world or Martin Luther King's dreams of a more just society or Bruno Bettelheim's wish that children be treated better."
The mature response, he said, is not to ignore the failings, as young children often do when idealizing their parents. Nor should Americans disown and disavow their leaders, as adolescents do as they try to reject their parents.
"To live better lives, we need heroes, but we need human heroes. We need to accept not only their greatness but their shortcomings as well," Szajnberg said.
by CNB