The Unremembered Dead

     In the days of the Roman republic, a child grew up under the watchful eyes of his elders.  Not only those who happened to be alive at the time: looking down upon him from the lintel above the hearth would be the images of his ancestors, made from waxen castings of their faces at their death.  They became the household gods, whose example you had to live up to.  They gave the Roman a sense that his life stretched back into the misty past, and would extend into the time to come, when his own descendants in turn would revere him, in gratitude for the long heritage he had faithfully passed down to them.

     I think that that reflects a natural human longing, whether or not we have been given the revelation of eternal life in Christ.  Imagine what it might be like, not to be forgotten, but to know, as you are growing old, that you will soon be forgotten -- that, in a few short years after your death, no one will care for you, or will preserve your wisdom, or uphold what you stood for, or honor your grave.  Would that not be like dying before dying?  Isn't there a pathetic rootlessness of time as well as of place?  Maybe we can define modern life as that truncated and diminished state of having no home to call your own, no country to serve, no family tradition, maybe no family at all, no piously tended grave, no past, and no future.

     If that's the case, then our educators do a very fine job preparing children for modern life.  They too sever them from home, country, family, the past, and the future.  In the April Touchstone there's a brief report of a study done by a Stanford professor of education, who asked 2000 high school students to name the ten most famous Americans from the time Columbus stepped foot on the continent to the present.  The choices are telling.

     Washington, the only man of his time who could have kept together his ragged and miserable army at Valley Forge, to whose patience and determination and sheer audacity we owe our victory over England, did not make the list.  Jefferson, the planter and scientist and political thinker, the writer of the Declaration, did not make the list.  The great minds of Madison and Hamilton, who hammered out our federalist constitution, do not impress our scholars now; those two did not make the list.  Adams, a more acute thinker than all of them, is forgotten.  Lincoln did not make the list.  Indeed, no President at all made it, from the political left or right.  Neither of the Roosevelts, nor Wilson, nor Reagan, made the list.

     No soldier made the list.  All you who serve your nation by putting your lives on the line, you will not be remembered.  MacArthur, Doolittle, Patton, Grant, Lee, Stonewall Jackson -- no chance.  All you others who risked your lives in exploration, you too can sit down.  Lewis and Clark do not make the list, nor do Daniel Boone, Alan Shepherd, John Glenn, and Neil Armstrong.  Industrialists, we know, are just bad people, so all those whose efforts made the effete left of our day even possible, can take the ingratitude and lump it.  J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford do not make the list.  One inventor makes the list -- the only one whose name a student will recognize, without, however, knowing just how many hundreds of things he invented, and how great was the perspiration that brought his fruition to genius.  No other inventor makes the list: no Whitney, McCormack, Morse, Graham Bell (half Canadian), Goodyear, Fulton.

     People in the old days wrote in funny long boring sentences, so none of them make the list: no Emerson or Thoreau or Hawthorne or Irving.  Herman Melville may have written the greatest of all novels, if you can call Moby-Dick a novel and not a prose poem of many hundreds of pages; but Melville does not make the list.  Emily Dickinson may be the greatest woman poet ever; too bad for Emily Dickinson.  Walt Whitman, for the worse I think, revolutionized modern poetry and has been regarded as the quintessential poet of democracy.  Too bad for Walt; he is forgotten.  In fact, no men of letters make the list: no Faulkner, Hemingway, O'Neill, Frost, not even the boilerplate-writing Harriet Beecher Stowe.  Religion is boring and reminds us of our duties to those who have come before us, so no religious figure makes the list: no Jonathan Edwards, the greatest theological mind America has produced, no Billy Graham, no Fulton Sheen.

     If you're thinking of popular culture, some figures do make the list.  No first-rate actors, though, no directors, no musicians, no composers, no star athletes.  Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, sit down.  Who's Jim Thorpe?  George Gershwin might as well have been from Mongolia.  No Glenn Miller, no Charlie Parker, not even Bob Dylan.

     Here then are the ten most famous Americans, according to our high school students.  The first three are in order; the next seven are only as I remember them.  A few (1, 8, and 9) are good choices, and another (10) would be, if he had spent his prime in America:

1. Martin Luther King
2. Harriet Tubman
3. Rosa Parks
4. Susan B. Anthony
5. Amelia Earhart
6. Oprah Winfrey
7. Marilyn Monroe
8. Benjamin Franklin
9. Thomas Edison
10. Albert Einstein

     Now before you defend the kids for choosing according to fame rather than merit, I'd note that hardly anybody outside of America would even have heard of 2, 3, and 4, and perhaps 5.  I don't wish to cast aspersions on any of the ten people up there -- if you're as fine and brave a human being as Harriet Tubman was, you're rare indeed.  But political correctness, which is not founded in any deep feeling of gratitude, determines half the choices, and celebrity the others.  I also doubt that most of the students would even have recognized the names of half of the people I mentioned. 

     Your own top ten, ladies and gentlemen, for deserved renown, not celebrity?