The American understanding of heroes and history may be summed up in Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of "monumental history." According to Nietzsche, it is motivated by faith in humanity, with the basic idea that states that "the great moments in the individual battle form a chain, a highroad for humanity through the ages, and the highest points of those vanished moments are yet great and living for men."²² And Nietzsche further articulates precisely the theme that gave rise to the New England cult of the hero and historiography: "If the man who will produce some­thing great has need of the past, he makes himself its master by means of monumental history."²³

But Bancroft's monumental history was sufficiently leavened with hu­manism to keep the national chosenness and apocalyptic structure from overwhelming man entirely, debasing him to the other-determined object of collective-libidinous processes, to which monumental history of the nation-state kind was only too easily inclined at the time. Bancroft's popularity, the product of a style indebted to the romantic aesthetic, cor­rected the success of such tendencies in America, which appeared in the form of Darwinian historiography of the late nineteenth century.

The nexus of hero and history, implied in the concept of monumental history, is expressly turned into the content of history by Emerson: "There is properly no history, only biography."²⁴ It is also preserved when, as in the democratic cult of the genius celebrated by the Jacksonians, the common man becomes the hero; this variant of hero worship already occurs in the works of Thomas Carlyle. In contrast to Europe, however, America did not furnish any speculative undertaking transcending self-interpretation, such as the work of an American Machiavelli or Carlyle. The few attempts at a theorization of this complex made use of Euro­pean categories: Emerson reproduced Carlyle; Alexander Everett fell back on Victor Cousin.²⁵ This did not change until the twentieth century, when American self-understanding became the object of examination; Dixon Wecter, Merrill D. Peterson, Seymour Martin Lipset, Wesley Frank Craven, Daniel Boorstin, all study the figure and role of the hero in America.

I believe that two factors are responsible for this situation. One is the understandable intellectual parochialism of the new nation at the outer­most limits of the western inhabited world; the other is the extraordinary functional significance of the cult of the hero.

Beyond this basic difference, Boorstin, though he ignored the New England heroic tradition and the specifically modern European cult of the hero, points out that "in America the compression of time and the extension of space transformed the whole problem." Boorstin compared the rapid exaltation of historical figures through democratic mass litera­ture at the moment of becoming a nation with the long process in which the heroes of the early European period (Achilles, Beowulf, Romulus, King Arthur) gradually changed through oral transmission into figures of a high literature written for a small upper class and eventually became a component in the national cult of the hero. But this is an unacceptable restriction of European phenomena; and correct as the observation of "chronological abridgment" and trivialization through subliterature in a completely literate society may be, it nevertheless seems to me true for all new nation states. A result of American conditions is surely the re­gional "superman," most often admixed with folkloristic comedy ele­ments, whom Boorstin also differentiates from the consciously con­structed national heroes in the manner of George Washington.²⁶