Imaginary Heroes

In the 1930s in America, an ongoing debate raged over the proper means of representing a complex problem. A sweeping depression had brought the country to its knees. New combinations of photographs and text emerged. The images and texts have so deeply influenced our consciousness of this time that it can truly be said that our memory of the thirties exists in black and white. Beyond the specific poles of reference that exist in texts like The Grapes of Wrath and Tobacco Road, or images like Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, we live immersed in a culture that carries proudly the heroic models established at this time. It was during this time that we truly became a nation, and the individuality of heroes became displaced by a new collective idea of the American people as the heroic representatives of liberty standing against the tests of misfortune.

An originary myth such as this is fragile. It can easily be argued that nationalism was born long before the twentieth century, and that this perception of collective heroism is merely another permutation of the modern triumph of propaganda, and of socially engineered identity. However, in the texts and images of the 1930s there exists evidence of the struggles of representation and authority, of heroic valuation and critical despair. To understand the emergence of not only new heroic models but new genres of authority, a deep genealogy reaching back hundreds of years before this time is necessary. Modes and standards of heroism do not spring forth from this time uncontested and fully formed, but rather by careful choices of form and function, of value and deprecation. In the turbulent years between two world wars, mythic models of heroic behavior that would carry a nation through the subsequent decades of peace emerged. But they are not without precedent. The roots are deep, predating the discovery of the continent and its colonization. They reach into the roots of storytelling itself, and any account of these roots is indeed, a story in itself. Rather than beginning at the beginning, perhaps it is better to define an end point.

Many climaxes to the imaginary American hero story could be postulated. According to some, Edward Steichen’s 1955 Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art was the apogee of the modernist universalizing impulse. Yet despite the premature proclamations of the death of master narratives, subsuming heroic behavior into a group identity continues. The celebration of firefighters following the disaster of September 11, 2001 is a contemporary example. The commemorative photograph of the flag rising amid the ruins of the World Trade Center echoes Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of the WWII triumph on Iwo Jima. In both cases, it is a collective effort. In both cases, the presence is established through an iconic, metaphoric image.

Rosenthal won the Pulitzer Prize for his photograph in 1945, and it has become a part of the American story. It was not faked, as some accounts suggest— but it is not what it seems to be. The flag raising he photographed was the second time the American flag was erected on the island; it was a larger flag than the one planted by a company of men earlier in the same day, in the heat of battle. The inscription of the statue created from Rosenthal’s photograph reads “Uncommon Valor was a Common Virtue”— the paradox of the American hero exists in these words. Three of the six men who raised this flag were dead shortly afterward. One of the survivors, Pima Indian Ira Hayes, was uncomfortable with being called a hero: “How could I feel like a hero when only five men in my platoon of 45 survived, when only 27 men in my company of 250 managed to escape death or injury?” Hayes died three months after attending the dedication of the statue, and two days before the Family of Man exhibition opened on January 26, 1955. He died of exposure in a hut on the reservation after an all night poker game. Some blame his death on being labeled a hero; everyone wanted to buy the hero a drink.

We expect to find in the commonplace, uncommon virtues. The anonymous firefighter or soldier, stripped of proper names becomes the hero through a submission to universality, a surrender of identity to better conform to the mythic narrative of heroes. How are we to understand these imaginary heroes? At once a part of this consciousness, and an indictment of it, James Agee and Walker Evan’s penultimate documentary of three tenant farm families in the thirties, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, may hold some clues. Agee died in May of 1955, and the book had been largely unnoticed. It sold just over 1000 copies when it was first published in 1941. Agee’s fame grew after the posthumous publication of his novel A Death in the Family in 1957. He won the Pulitzer Prize for that novel in the year I was born, 1958.

Republished and expanded in 1960, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has never gone out of print since. The title, taken as ironic by many, is the first line in Chapter 44 of Sirach from the Apocrypha. It lists twelve classes of heroes who were the pride of their times.

Some of them have left behind a name,
so that others declare their praise.
But of others there is no memory;
they have perished as though they had never existed;
they have become has though they had never been born,
they and their children after them. (44:8-9)

The assurance is implicit that these people will be remembered by God. Taken in this context, the title doesn’t seem so ironic; the simple dignity of Evans’s photographs and Agee’s text assures that these families, protected by pseudonyms, will live in the history of representation. In most ways, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is about the futility of representation. Agee’s text is self-indulgent, and Evans’s photographs are aesthetic and displaced. It neither purports to be, nor is, a complete representation of their lives. It is a document about documents. The industry of criticism and commentary about the book has in most ways deeply obscured the context from which it sprang, radical and controversial, against the universalizing impulses of documentary practitioners before it.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men emerged from a backdrop of a sincerely concerned, highly rhetorical, explosion of documentary photo-text combinations. In the decades that followed, it eclipsed all heroic overtures before it. The aesthetic climate of the sixties embraced its futility, its failure— as the ultimate confirmation that all art must be subjective. The heroic model of renegade artist displaced the praise of the commonplace, common hero, which Agee certainly sought to celebrate. The dominant rhetorical forces of other photo-textual documents of the time were now perceived as quaint and sentimental, compared to the rough poetic diamond produced by Evans and Agee.

It soon became fashionable to indict the government photo agency Evans worked for, the Historical Division of the Farm Security Administration [FSA] as manipulative and exploitive. Revisionist histories plow the ruins of the liberal agenda of the thirties looking for the underlying structures of power in the FSA. But this agency was only a single locus of activity, and not the sole source of documentary products of the 1930s. There were differing impulses, unique individuals, and a pregnant climate for innovation. One trope, both inside and outside the FSA, remains constant. There is an unceasing effort at validation, and celebration of specific genres of heroic consciousness; a constant need to validate the products of this time as representative of the problems they seek to convey. However, there are conflicting definitions of heroism and the kairos of heroic behavior. It is hard to know where to begin. As a terminus for the development of the modern American model of heroic behavior, Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition of 1955 and Evans and Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men of 1941 provide a dialogic framework.

The Family of Man was embraced by the popular conscience. Over nine million people in thirty-seven countries viewed it. It was critically reviled, and denounced as a great leap backward by the aesthetic intelligencia. It was entirely content focused, and built upon a simple thesis: “the common man” was our greatest hope, and photography was a tool to demonstrate that all men were equal. Aesthetically, it did not differentiate between artists great or small, and hence was seen as a setback for those who would install photography as the premier artistic medium of the day. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was a work that was published at the wrong time; it failed to capture the popular audience, already inundated with numerous other examples of photo-textual documents, and was received with harsh critical judgment as well. However, its reprinting in 1960 brought critical accolades, and rapid embrace by a strong cult following. Content was unimportant in the face of its style. Nevertheless, it represents two styles— a cold hard aestheticism contrasting deeply with the florid, subjective prose of Agee. Evans and Agee were iconoclasts, each rebelling against the conventions of their media. They were individuals crusading for particularity in the face of universalizing discourse.

Aesthetic debate is only one aspect of the forces at work. To understand the simultaneous embrace of conflicting models of heroic behavior, it seems crucial to examine closely the rhetoric of representation. There are questions of venue— the public exhibition, perfected through the growth of salons and government-funded displays vs. the artist’s book. There are questions of technology, as the impetus for all these documentary efforts was facilitated through changes that mark profound shifts in audiences for representational output. There are also key differences in attitude beyond the division of the universal and the particular. Steichen’s Family of Man is imbued with a progressive, evolutionary view of history where we move forward on an endless ladder of improvement. Evans and Agee’s vision seems far more tragic; a world where dissolution and forgetting threatens to destroy any memory of our time, and a tragic ambivalence to its current state. Behind Steichen is the sensibility of the public relations man presenting his hopeful product to an audience. Historical consciousness permeates both sides, and the heroic metaphor provides a convenient locus to examine why one approach might be valued more highly than another. The ostensible subject of the “common man” as hero remains the same.

My facile assertion in the opening paragraph that the shift from heroic individuality to collective heroes began in 1930s documentary practice can only be confirmed by precise definitions. Documentary practice is commonly assigned a birth date early in the twentieth century; it is a peculiarly specific subset of historical practice. In The Discourse of History Roland Barthes remarks that historical practice exists in a “circle of paradox” where narrative evidence, which originates in fiction, becomes the “sign and proof of reality.” Documentary practice in the 1930s begins in fiction, and culminates in new forms of metaphoric proof. A common misreading of this practice assumes that the naive photographers of the early twentieth century labored under the assumption that photographs were somehow true; an illusion waiting to be dissipated in the feverish currents of postmodernism. Given the origins of photography, this hardly seems likely. Photographs constitute evidentiary performances of carefully selected points of view. They are inherently rhetorical, and often unselfconsciously poetic. Sequence and placement of photographs in the seminal texts of the thirties was often directly narrative, and when it wasn’t (as in the case of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) the presence of a narrative text certainly affected their weight as evidence. The photographic evidence was more directly metaphoric rather than actual. Prefaces to all the major works of the 1930s reflect a deep awareness of the function of both text and image as signs rather than textual assertions and photographic proof.

There are two major themes that must be dealt with together, rather than separately. First, there is the paradox of history. Second, there is the valuation of exemplary, or heroic behavior. What constitutes heroic behavior has obviously shifted across time, and this makes examination of the forces leading to heroic validation crucial. A map of methodology and the key definitions involved must be provided for navigating this text. I have sketched out a potential place to end; locating a place to begin also seems prudent.

[*Apologies for the lame ending— its six am and I’ve been writing this all night.]