Do we need heroes? I think so.

The historian Woody Holton, a specialist in the American founding era, recently reflected on the political debate over how the history of American slavery should be taught in public schools:

I mean, what’s happening in those school board meetings is amazing. People yelling at other parents — we know where you live! You’re never going to come out in public again because we know who you are! People are really at each other’s throats over stealing their heroes. So that raises a great question: Can we get by without heroes?

And for one thing, I think we don’t have to, because there are people we can share. Why can’t we share Martin Luther King? Why does it have to be slaveholders that we unite around? And why does it all have to be white men when we’re talking about the Revolutionary era? … 

I have a new theory about this. Washington did do … some incredibly heroic things as commander in chief. For instance, he prevented his officers from carrying out a coup d’état in 1783 to get some pensions that they felt like they’d been promised. …

It was not so heroic to hold those more than 300 people as slaves right up until his death. And his policy was that they wouldn’t be freed until Martha died, and Martha was smart enough to be paranoid. These people are a heartbeat away from freedom, and that’s my heartbeat. And so she went ahead and freed them. But there’s a Washington to be proud of and a Washington to be less proud of. …

We’ve got to let go of the heroes and replace them with heroics.

There is — as the academics like to say — a lot to unpack here. Holton seems to say three different things, and I think one of them is much truer than the other two:

• Americans can unite around — “share” — heroes. It’s just that we need to pick the right ones. Martin Luther King, Jr. is a better choice than George Washington.

• “We’ve got to let go of the heroes and replace them with heroics.” For instance, Washington’s heroics as a general were admirable, even though his ownership of enslaved people was not.

• Even if there are heroes, the same person can somehow be both a hero and not. Thus we have “a Washington be proud of” and “a Washington to be less proud of.” There was only one man, yet there are two different protagonists in two different stories.

I think Point Three above is the wise one. The other two don’t really click.

Start with the first point. The example Holton gives of a hero that all Americans can share (as I take to be his meaning) is Martin Luther King, Jr. King has become for many people a kind of secular civic saint of America, one whose nonviolence makes him simpler to admire than Malcolm X or the Panthers. Perhaps it’s clearer to say, the kind of admiration one can expect one’s neighbors to have for King is purer and simpler than the admiration that may be due to more figures.

Because that’s what it’s about, at these school boards. Not what any one person is free to believe. It’s about what Americans, by dint of their American-ness, can be expected to understand about their past. Especially American kids.

But I don’t think any human is really so simple as to give all Americans a straightforwardly, unproblematically “sharable” hero. Certainly not King himself. He plagiarized portions of his doctoral thesis. His personal life — unconstitutionally surveilled and disrupted by the FBI — was messy. If we can’t call him a hero anyway, given all that he achieved, it feels a fair bet that no one else will qualify, either. 

With the second bullet the problem is, what does it even mean to call something “heroic”? If a heroic act is the kind of thing a hero would do — but nobody qualifies as a hero because we’ve all got faults — then neither heroes nor heroism seem like very useful concepts, at least for us here and now.

Maybe I should like this approach. I’ve certainly beat the drum about how people are often wrong to chalk things up to character. Maybe “heroic” should just mean something like super-good, or super admirable. Sure, “heroes” were once a category of person, we might say, but that’s just a historic relic.

But I don’t think it would work.

Trying to isolate heroic acts from the people who do them would be a losing game. We need stories in which real people do the heroic things, stories with lessons to teach about what is or might be possible at best. Shared stories are a big part of belonging. I think we need those, nationally, somehow. Even though people are flawed.

Someone can be the hero of one true story, and the villain of another.

Being a Rhodes scholar gives me ample cause to wonder about this. Cecil Rhodes was a believer and architect of the British colonial project, who held and acted on a patronizing and racist view of native Africans. In the areas now known as Zimbabwe and Zambia — which were called Southern and Northern Rhodesia, respectively, for much of the twentieth century, after him — Rhodes was a dominating presence. His wealth came from diamonds that locals were forced to extract from the land.

And yet the idea that peace and progress might be furthered if leaders from different countries shared a language and some formative experience (which is itself one among the stories that could be told about what the scholarship is for) is basically a good and noble idea. Rhodes wanted to fund athlete-leaders, and might well have been displeased that I, a physically disabled person, number among his beneficiaries. But the scholarships have done, and still do, enormous good in the world. Some of the Trust’s assets have been applied, both to bring students from southern Africa to study in Oxford, and to create a scholarship program within Africa. When I was a student, and we were asked to toast the Founder — a tradition that has since been set aside — that’s how I thought about it. I toast what, in Rhodes, I admire. Nelson Mandela once did the same. Even anti-Rhodes activists have reconciled themselves to participating in the system he established.

The impulse to control how past leaders are imagined — to paint Jefferson only as the heroic statesman, or only as the evil slaveholder — can at times be found both among those who want to preserve older American stories, and among those who would tell new ones. The Times’ 1619 project now has a new book — its subtitle is “A New Origin Story.” This belongs in our collection of central stories, not as a substitute for the old heroic tales, but as a needed accompaniment to them. (The Times also did a wonderful essay about the history of American history, the many debates over how to tell the American story.)

When it comes to monuments and naming things after people, the key part is to make sure what the namesake is being admired or thanked for. And to build a context where the heroic story doesn’t drown out the others.

The most important historical lesson for schoolchildren, in the end, may be that each hero is also a human being, and that no heroic story is a complete story of its protagonist.