Why are Tech Billionaires the New National Heroes?
From 19th Century Military Heroes to Tech Giants
Manufactured Heroism
A Beezone Enquiry
Why do we instinctively trust innovators with the fate of the planet, our politics, and even our children’s futures? The answer isn’t just in their algorithms—it’s in our culture’s myths.
Anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace saw it coming. Long before the age of Silicon Valley, Wallace mapped how industrialists were transformed into moral icons through deliberate cultural storytelling. In Chapter X of Modernity and Mind: Essays on Culture Change, he revealed how nineteenth-century educators, writers, and public institutions sculpted figures like George Stephenson (pioneering railway engineer and inventor of the ‘Rocket’, the most famous early railway locomotive.) into the heroic equivalents of military generals and saints. These were not just men of machines, but saviors of society.
Today, we’re still living inside that myth—only now the heroes wear hoodies and command cloud empires. We’ve swapped swords for stock portfolios, and battlegrounds for boardrooms.
The following essay is a look into that transformation. It’s not about nostalgia or critique—it’s about seeing the wires behind the curtain. Wallace’s insights help us remember: cultural heroes are made, not born. And the stories we tell about success shape what—and who—we believe in.
Read on. It’s not just history. It’s the blueprint of now.
Preface
In January of 2025, during the Presidential Inauguration in Washington, D.C., a striking image circulated widely: standing shoulder to shoulder with the President of the United States were not military generals or lifelong public servants, but the titans of the digital economy—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates. It was a moment that, though not unexpected, symbolized a long arc of cultural transformation. The industrialist, once merely a man of commerce and production, had long since become something else entirely: a moral exemplar, a national icon, even a kind of secular saint.
This image also signaled a deeper shift in the idea of leadership itself. The world’s most pressing crises—climate change, pandemics, AI governance, and even geopolitical tensions—are increasingly framed as problems to be solved on the economic battlefield. The language of diplomacy has absorbed the vocabulary of competition, innovation, and market share. Economic power is now equated with moral authority, and billionaires stand beside heads of state not merely as guests but as collaborators in shaping the future.
Yet cultural and religious conflicts persist—often simmering beneath the surface of global dialogue—as remnants of nineteenth- and twentieth-century mythological systems. These older narratives still define many people’s identities, loyalties, and willingness to fight. While they are increasingly overshadowed by economic ideologies, they haven’t disappeared. Instead, we now live in a hybrid mythos—part Silicon Valley, part ancient tribe. The transition from soldier to industrialist to tech magnate as heroic figure masks a deeper continuity: our need to mythologize power, to embody virtue in figures we can admire, fear, or follow. That, too, is a story worth investigating—but one for another time.
This essay is written in response to the specific legacy of the industrial hero. It draws upon the work of anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace, whose essay in Modernity and Mind: Essays on Culture Change uncovers how the image of the industrialist as hero was constructed in nineteenth-century America through deliberate myth-making. Wallace’s analysis offers a mirror in which we can examine today’s cult of innovation and economic power, not as an inevitable outgrowth of genius or merit, but as a cultural project with deep roots in education, media, and public ritual.
What follows is not only an exploration of Wallace’s scholarship but also an attempt to trace the enduring legacy of a myth we often forget was invented.
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The Industrial Hero: A Cultural Invention
Tracing the Legacy of Anthony F. C. Wallace’s Insight into Manufactured Heroism
by Beezone
This essay draws on Chapter X of Essays on Culture Change by Anthony F.C. Wallace, edited by Robert S. Grumet (University of Nebraska Press, 2003).
e live in an era where entrepreneurs are lionized as visionaries, where economic success is viewed not merely as personal gain but as public virtue, and where the act of innovation is treated with a reverence once reserved for soldiers and saints. Yet few pause to ask where this framework of values originated. Even fewer ask how it was deliberately constructed. Decades before terms like “startup culture” or “disruption” entered the popular lexicon, anthropologist and ethnohistorian Anthony F. C. Wallace was already tracing the lineage of this heroic ideal, unearthing its cultural scaffolding. His work, especially Chapter X of Modernity and Mind: Essays on Culture Change, offers a rare and insightful analysis of how the figure of the industrialist emerged as a hero in nineteenth-century American society—and how that heroic image continues to echo through our culture today.
Wallace’s concern is not with heroism as a timeless or transcendent category, but rather as a cultural artifact: the hero, he argues, is a product of myth-making, shaped by the needs and values of a specific society at a specific time. Drawing upon revitalization theory, he suggests that the celebration of heroes is one mechanism by which societies affirm new moral systems. Just as ancient cultures invented divine figures who brought fire or agriculture, so too modern industrial culture elevated its engineers, inventors, and capitalists to the status of redeemers. But unlike the spontaneous emergence of traditional myths, Wallace points to a more deliberate lessons of hero construction—an unconscious orchestrated effort through schools, literature, public rituals, and biographies to instill the values of industrial capitalism.
The figure of George Stephenson, the English mining engineer and railway pioneer, becomes emblematic in Wallace’s analysis. In a striking passage, Wallace recounts how Stephenson, testing his safety lamp in a dangerous coal mine, was described in terms more often associated with battlefield gallantry. Samuel Smiles, the popular biographer and moralist, portrayed Stephenson’s solitary descent into the mine as a moment of redemptive courage, framing it as more noble than a soldier’s charge into enemy fire. This was not merely storytelling; it was cultural engineering. Smiles and his contemporaries were crafting a new moral vocabulary in which the industrialist was no longer a mere tradesman or speculator, but a selfless servant of human progress.
Wallace’s tone throughout is both analytical and ironic. He doesn’t mock the celebration of figures like Stephenson, but he does invite us to see them not as inevitable icons but as constructed symbols, carefully shaped to legitimize the social transformations of the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution brought about massive upheavals—in labor, in family life, in the distribution of power and capital. In this context, the construction of the industrial hero served to naturalize these changes, to present them not as disruptive but as noble. The entrepreneur became the savior of the modern world.
This transformation did not take place in the abstract. Wallace carefully traces how this myth was disseminated, especially through the educational systems of towns like St. Clair and Pottsville, Pennsylvania—mining communities where the industrial order was both omnipresent and fragile. Wallace notes how primary education emphasized docility and obedience, while heroic aspiration was reserved for secondary instruction, by which point most working-class children had already left school. The message was clear: greatness is attainable, but only through conformity and delayed reward. Those few who emerged from humble beginnings to achieve wealth and influence were held up as exemplars, not only of individual success but of moral fortitude. In Wallace’s words, they were “exemplars of a newly recognized virtue.”
What Wallace also captures, subtly but powerfully, is the fusion of military and industrial imagery. The qualities once associated with generals—courage, discipline, sacrifice—were now being mapped onto the businessman, the inventor, the mine owner. Even public monuments, like the towering statue of Henry Clay in Pottsville, became part of this symbolic economy, blending political patriotism with economic virtue. The industrialist did not simply replace the soldier; he absorbed him, redefined him, and inherited his aura.
The implications of Wallace’s insights extend far beyond the nineteenth century. Today’s tech CEOs, venture capitalists, and startup founders are cast in similar roles. Their biographies follow familiar arcs: humble origins, self-reliance, visionary risk-taking, eventual triumph. The media celebrates their perseverance; schools teach their stories as moral instruction; governments court their investments as if anointed. The myth persists, not because it is timeless, but because it was built to last—precisely through the kinds of cultural channels Wallace so astutely dissected.
To revisit Wallace now is to recover a sense of historical contingency. It is to remember that our heroes are not born but made, and that the process of making them is itself an act of power. Wallace never argues against heroism outright. Rather, he asks us to look closely at the values our heroes embody, and to consider who benefits from their celebration. In doing so, he offers a model of scholarship that is both critical and humane—one that seeks not to destroy myths, but to illuminate their architecture.
As we continue to navigate the moral terrain of innovation, technology, and economic growth, Wallace’s voice remains a necessary one. He reminds us that cultural change is never value-neutral, and that the symbols we elevate say as much about our fears and aspirations as they do about our facts. In an age still searching for saviors, Modernity and Mind gives us the tools to question the altars we build—and perhaps, to imagine new kinds of heroism altogether.
Chapter 10
THE INDUSTRIALIST AS HERO
An Emerging Educational Theme in Nineteenth-Century America
Each age, each culture has its myths and rituals that celebrate and affirm values, rationalize (and sanctify and mystify) a social order, motivate people to do what has to be done, and set forth models for emulation and respect. One kind of model is the hero. Heroes are celebrated in most if not all literate societies. What makes a hero a hero—whether military man or religious martyr or explorer or industrialist—is taking great personal risks for the sake ofpublic good. It is part of the responsibility of formal educational systems—the schools—to teach pupils what heroism is, in a particular society, and also to teach that heroism is rewarded by public approbation. Other parts of the communication network also educate the community about heroism—literature and the arts, public rituals of award, the news media, informal gossip and yarn-telling.
The social sciences have been somewhat slow in dealing with heroes. William J. Goode’s sociological treatise on The Celebration of Heroes places the subject within the context of “exchange theory,” and views the distribution of prestige as a social control system. People are motivated to do what someone else wants them to do by offering various inducements in exchange including money, services, and social approval. The celebration of heroes, both major and minor, is one of the forms of inducement (Goode 1978). Erving Goffman has also tout hed upon the subject matter in his series of works on the vicissitudes of respect and self-esteem in public personal interactions (see, e.g., Goffman 1959). But Goode treats heroism very lightly in a chapter devoted to a pot pourri of prizes, awards, ribbons, and honorific offices. Between an evaluation of Emmy awards for television programs, and a discussion of stock shows and country fairs, he devotes a page and a half to “military heroism,” and concludes that “perhaps’ the military establishment is right in honoring conspicuous bravery, which must be “held up as an ideal, so that soldiers may be able to function adequately even when frightened by the prospect of death” (Goode 1978:170-171). Goffman also deals with so wide a range of prestige enhancing or reducing interactions that heroism perse does emerge as a salient theme. Perhaps the anthropologist Victor Turner comes closest to our interest in heroes in a paper on Manuel Hidalgo, the Mexican priest who announced the Mexican Revolution in September 1810. The paper traces the brief revolutionary career of Hidalgo and his rise to the status of a public symbol of the aspirations of the Mexican people; but it also analyzes in some detail the meaning of his actions and words, and focuses particularly upon his choice of Our Lady of Guadalupe as the spiritual symbol of an independent Mexico. She represented in heavenly metaphor, as Hidalgo did in more earthly terms, that union of traditional Indianness with the liberal values of the European Enlightenment that the revolutionaries sought to bring to post-colonial Mexico (Turner 1974). Turners work adds the important point that the elevation of an historical figure (or a humble soldier) to the status of hero may not be merely an example of rewarding some traditionally desirable behavior by prestige. It may rather be the celebration of a new system of values deemed to be necessary for the welfare of future as well as present citizens of the commonwealth, albeit a system of values difficult and dangerous of realization. Hidalgo, and our Lady of Guadalupe, were not shining exemplars of either Aztec or Spanish virtue; they represented a newly emerging synthesis.
It is this sacred type of hero, who at great personal risk or even sacrifice brings to the community the benefits of a new way of life, with which we are concerned here. They are not unlike the “culture heroes” of many primitive myths—supernatural beings who brought to man, in some ancient and long forgotten past, the miracles of fire, of language, of agriculture, of cities, of iron, of the rule of law and the knowledge of God. But the historical hero, the real-life hero, is not merely a donor of valuable knowledge; not merely a person who has risked life for others; they are exemplars of a newly recognized virtue. And it is in this exemplary function that the essence of heroism lies. The historical figure may indeed have achieved as much—or at least some part of—what legend credits them with doing. But the myth of the hero is made in the context of a social movement, by men and women eager to find a living exemplification of the new virtue, the new morality. The hero as a symbolic figure is thus the creation of a cadre of hero-makers; he (or she) is an artifact of what I have called a “revitalization movement” and of other, less dramatic but equally important, processes of culture change (see Wallace 1956b and Wallace 1961c). And the role of the schools (and those institutions that serve homologous functions in primitive cultures) in such rapidly changing societies is to teach young people the new morality, as defined by the society’s new political, economic, and religious leadership, and as exemplified by its new heroes.
One way of expressing this viewpoint is to say that styles in heroes change and that a society’s literature, if viewed historically, would reveal a stratigraphy of heroic images, all surviving simultaneously. As each image lost its revolutionary potential, it would be relegated to the category of traditional values, and perhaps eventually be enshrined as an archaic or even comic figure, highlighted—as with Cervantes’ bumbling knight—by its contrast with more useful modern values. In English literature, one is presented at the outset with the grisly heroism of Beowulf, slaying the monster Grendel in his watery lair, and generally clearing the countryside for the sake of his clan. But the symbolism almost escapes us now, beyond recognition of a theme of bravery against risk; what Beowulf fought for, perhaps, was some early, patriarchal, class-structured society in which the lord alone was privileged to hunt—and in exchange was personally responsible for hunting down man-killers. The exemplary lord is a hero who justifies his elite status by defending the peasantry from dangerous wild animals. But all this must be a speculative reconstruction of the symbol system of a by-gone new’ age from which practically no other literary legacy remains but the poetry that celebrated its emerging heroes.
We are on surer ground as we approach the present and, in particular, that moment not long past when a new genre of heroes was created in the western world to fit the demands of an industrial society ruled by a middle class. The hundred years between 1800 and 1900, in England and America, saw the elevation of the industrialist, and his allies in political and commercial life, not replacing but at least rivaling the traditional military heroes of the past. For an expression of the pre-industrial eighteenth-century position we can do no better than turn to Adam Smith, who in 1759 published his Theory of Moral Sentiments, a work well received by his contemporaries and destined to pass through many editions. Smith argued that people are motivated in significant part by a desire to secure the esteem of their fellows by virtuous conduct; he was articulating an early version of the exchange theory that we have already found in the pages of William J. Goode.
The esteem and admiration which every impartial spectator conceives for the real merit of those spirited, magnanimous, and high-minded persons, as it is a just and well-founded sentiment, so it is a steady and permanent one, and altogether independent of their good or bad fortune . . . That degree of self-estimation, therefore, which contributes most to the happiness and contentment of the person himself, seems likewise most agreeable to the impartial spectator. The man who esteems himself as he ought, seldom fails to obtain from other people all the esteem that he himself thinks due. He desires no more than is due to him, and he rests upon it with complete satisfaction.
But as exemplars of heroic virtue, Smith mentioned only great military leaders, of both ancient and modern times, and the Duke of Marlborough received his highest accolade on account of his unparalleled “coolness and self command” and his lack of “excessive self-estimation and presumption.” (Modesty was a necessary accompaniment of heroism, in Smith’s view.) Smith’s choice of Marlborough is an interesting one, for Marlborough’s reputation was at that time under a cloud on account of alleged irregularities in his political and financial affairs. But Smith focused only on his military conduct, evidently regarding political and economic behavior as irrelevant to virtue. The relative moral unimportance of economic behavior—the expression of man’s innate “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another—is an essential basis of his analysis of the sources of the wealth of nations. The welfare of the community, in economic matters, was owing not to the daring of heroic investors but to the “invisible hand” of economic law that guided collective action toward the common good. Similarly, he showed relatively little interest in the progress of mechanical invention, discussing it under the rubric of the “Division of Labor,” and concentrating attention mostly on the contributions of workmen who wanted to lighten their task. The critical improvement in the fire-engine (the automatic steam-value control) is ascribed to an unnamed boy who wanted “to divert himself with his playfellows” instead of attending to his task of opening and shutting the valve by hand. Newcomen, Smeaton, and Watt—steam-engine inventors and heroes of a later day—are not mentioned by their eighteenthcentury contemporaries. But, as many have remarked, Smith was not aware that an Industrial Revolution was occurring all around him despite his recognition of economic progress (see A. Smith 1809:343; A. Smith 1976 |1776|:i6, 477)-
The eighteenth-century position may be summarized as follows. Enlightened Europeans accorded the status of hero to men who at great risk to their own lives, property, or reputation undertook a course of action that was intended to preserve, or enhance, the welfare of the community, and particularly the nation as a whole. Victory was not necessary; heavy casualties among both followers and enemies were allowable; courage, perseverance, and good intentions were enough. For the most part, these conditions could be satisfied only by service in war and in the exploration of new lands. Ancient and legendary heroes possessed these attributes and newly created heroes did too, like Admiral Nelsor and General Washington and Christopher Columbus. Merchants, industrialists statesmen, and philosophers might be lauded as great men but they were nol heroes.
But seventy-five years later, Englishmen (and Americans and Frenchmen’ were acutely aware of an Industrial Revolution all about them, and the cult ol the economic, non-military hero was in full swing. The classic exponent of the cult was Samuel Smiles, a physician with experience as a railroad official, whe wrote his popular lives of the engineers to celebrate a new kind of hero. Smilej viewed the engineer as the man who, by developing new sources of energy, by inventing new machines, by opening new lands to cultivation, and by devising new means and channels of transportation, opened up benighted regions tc the light of modern civilization and brought order and health to ignorant lawless, hungry and diseased millions. Such benefactors of mankind were a special breed, emerging from the ranks of the rural working class, largely self- taught, and nobly courageous. The first exemplar of this type to receive Smiles treatment, in 1857, was George Stephenson, the coal miner, mining engineer inventor of a successful miners* safety lamp, and famous as the developer oi one of the first successful steam locomotives. Smiles’ rhetoric in describing Stephenson’s first trial of his lamp, as he advanced alone into a gassy mine with his lighted lamp in hand, defined the character of the industrial hero in vivid terms and explicitly contrasted him to the military hero:
. . . Stephenson declared his confidence in the safety of his lamp, and, having lit the wick, he boldly proceeded with it toward the explosive air. The others, more timid and doubtful, hung back when they came within hearing of the blower; and, apprehensive of the danger they retired into a safe place, out of sight of the lamp, which gradually disappeared with its bearer in the recesses of the mine. It was a critical moment, and the danger was such as would have tried the stoutest heart. Stephenson, advancing alone, with his yet untried lamp, in the depths of those underground workings, calmly venturing his life in the determination to discover a mode by which the lives of many might be saved, and death disarmed in these fatal caverns, presented an example of intrepid nerve and manly courage more noble than that which, in the excitement of battle and the collective impetuousity of a charge, carries a man up to the cannon’s mouth.
Smiles’ book was published in an American edition in the same year. Smiles went on to write competent and readable biographies of other engineers, including the seventeenth-century figures Cornelius Vermuyden and Hugh Myd- delton, who promoted the drainage of the Fens and the improvement of London’s water supply; eighteenth-century mechanicians James Bradley and John Smeaton, canal builders and improvers of the steam engine; Abraham Darby, who first successfully smelted iron with coke; and nineteenth-century bridge and canal-building engineers John Rennie and Thomas Telford. Smiles wrote books on the improvement of character with titles like Self Help, Duty, and Thrift. Throughout his emphasis was on the goal of development—the development of wild, uncultivated, uncivilized lands, and the correlative development of men of character. He articulated a mystique of industrial progress, seeing it as the means by which poverty, ignorance, violence, and vice could be eradicated, and prosperity, education, cooperation, and virtue advanced. His heroes, largely drawn from poor rural circumstances, developed their own characters and achieved wealth; and with dauntless courage and indomitable perseverance they worked to make such a good life possible for others. Smiles saw the process of economic development as a complex unfolding that required the services not only of inventors but also of engineers and investors, not only of mechanicians but also of scientists. It was no mere Horatio Alger or Tom Swift the Boy Inventor kind of fable that he was creating, but a valid myth for the times that celebrated the heroic virtues appropriate to the goal of industrialization. As confidence in industrial society itself has declined, of course, so has Smiles’ standing as a literary figure; but that is another story (Smiles 1868:182; see also Smiles 1966).
The impact of the emerging recognition of industrialist as hero forms one of the salient themes of my study of the mining district of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, in the latter part of the nineteenth century. I was particularly interest in the mining town of St. Clair, and the county seat, Pottsville—better known as Gibbsville from John O’Hara’s novels—two miles away, because in these towns one can see large matters exhibited in a small frame. The mines that formed an intricate maze of tunnels under St. Clair were owned by two Philadelphia families, the Careys and the Wetherills, who were absentee landlords but whose business agents—frequently family members themselves—lived in Pottsville. Pottsville, as the county seat, was the home of the lawyers, the engineers, the mine operators, the newspaper publishers, and other leaders who determined the intellectual climate of the region. And it was from Pottsville that the industrialist-as-hero theme was disseminated to the smaller towns like St. Clair.
George Stephenson as hero was introduced to Schuylkill County most emphatically on the occasion of the thirteenth annual meeting of the Schuylkill County Teachers’ Institute in December 1875. The sessions were held in Pottsville and attended by the teachers and principals of all the public schools in the county (including St. Clair). During these Institutes the schools were closed for the week so that the teachers could receive special training in the theory and method of education. After the day’s work of discussing the philosophy and mechanics of education, there were evening entertainments. Traditionally the second evening was devoted to a lecture about a famous man, a military hero or literary lion, generally; the previous year the subject had been Sherman’s March to the Sea. But on this occasion the speaker, a Mr. William Parsons of Dublin— a popular figure on the Lyceum circuit—chose to substitute for the announced subject (the dramatist, Richard Sheridan) his old friend, the “brave hero oi the mine,” George Stephenson. Most of the hour and a half was devoted to Stephenson’s locomotive exploits, but the introduction told the story of Stephenson and the burning pit, to establish his character in early youth:
… [We] find our hero, a little boy, in the coal pits of Northumberland, 1500 feet underground, employed to open the door in the mine, and begging the miners as they passed, for what? A bit of candy, a penny, or a child’s plaything? No! only for a bit of candle to make the darkness visible. In these mines 40,000 colliers were employed, a body of grimy, hard-handed, rough-featured men, living the life of serfs, without a vote, without books or schools, but brave men withall, for they daily hold their lives in their hands. Let us look in on a group of them, grumbling, swearing, perhaps quarreling. Suddenly someone rushes in among them crying “The pit’s afire!” They know what that means, 40, 50, perhaps 400 men burned or suffocated. They rush to the spot and one of their number descends into the jaws of death and hands up the bodies of the dead and dying miners; then he himself is drawn up senseless, but as soon as he revives he is ready to descend again. In this brave hero of the mine we see again our hero, now the youth, George Stephenson.
In a final fit of eloquence, the speaker attributed America’s entire prosperity, her freedom, her glowing future as the finest achievement of the human race, to George Stephenson and his locomotive (Schuylkill County Teachers’ Institute 1876:18, 21).
Having mentioned the schools, let us take the opportunity to look at the way in which the educational establishment in the coal regions dealt with the theme of heroism. First of all, it should be noted that within the county, the coal districts (in contrast to farming areas) were enthusiastic supporters of educational institutions, public and private, and eagerly adopted the public school system provided by the state laws of 1834 and 1854- Leaders in the movement were the Bannan clan of Pottsville. They included Benjamin Bannan, rich coal land speculator and publisher of the local newspaper; his brother John Bannan, a hero of the War of 1812 and one of the state’s leading attorneys; and his son Thomas, for a time the superintendent of schools for Schuylkill County. In St. Clair, two of the teachers were daughters of one of the town’s leading industrial figures, mining engineer and inventor, Robert Allison.
What was communicated, in the way of values, in these schools? Although Ruth Elson in her survey of the moral content of nineteenth-century school books notes the almost universal presence of national military/political heroes, headed by George Washington, she emphasized the distinction between the hero and the great man (Washington was a hero because he was brave and the father of his country; Franklin was merely a great man because he was only wise and successful) (Elson 1964). But the presentation of the hero as an object of emulation was restrained in the primers for pre-pubertal readers; the moral message conveyed in the primers emphasized, above all, obedience.
Bannan’s New Columbian Primer, published in the 1830s in Pottsville by Be- najmin Bannan and in Philadelphia by Lippincott, drenched the young reader in praises of docility. The first part of the book consisted of alphabetical lessons: a page with a letter, a syllable beginning with the letter, a picture of an animal or person designated by a word beginning with that letter, and then a moral lesson. Thus, Lion: “The lion is the noblest of all beasts, and can be tamed like a cat or dog.” Horse: “The horse is a useful animal, and on account of his docility is loved and petted by his master.” Naughty Boy: “James was a naughty boy, and, like all disobedient children, was punished for breaking the looking glass with his ball.” “William and Lucy were good children, and their mamma praised them for their industry. Lucy would sit and sew, while William watered the flowers.” Following the alphabetical section came pages of moral aphorisms, aimed perhaps at more advanced readers, stating one after the other such principles as: “True merit is always modest,” “virtue is its own reward,” “honesty is the best policy,” “good and bad habits formed in youth commonly go with us through life.. . .”
Little Harry’s Indestructible Reading Book, printed in Philadelphia on indestructible linen cloth in 1857, was a little bit more literate, but conveyed the same moral lesson. A star figure was Blind Harry himself. Blind Harry, struck by lightning at sea, is “patient and does not complain, but gives thanks to his father in Heaven for his many blessings…. We should learn of him to be patient, and to submit to the will of God in all things. This is true wisdom.” The picture caption notes ambiguously: “Poor Blind Harry is all alone.”1
Blind obedience as a martial virtue was even celebrated in an address on “Culture of the Moral and Intellectual Faculties of Man” on the occasion of the opening of the Arcadian Institute at Orwigsburg in 1854 (published by Bannan). The keynote speaker said, among other things, that the value of history was to enable us to see ourselves as “ . . . soldiers in the ranks, to whom our great Captain has not revealed the plan of battle … as the vast army, enveloped in mystery, moves forward, each soldier knows that he is only to obey orders, while the design, yea even the success, of the battle is concealed from his knowledge.”2
It would seem, then, that training in heroism was deferred until the secondary grades, perhaps at puberty, by which time the young reader had already been well instructed in the necessity of discipline and obedience to the will of those in legitimate authority. (This separation must have, in effect, left the working class children with training in docility but not in heroism, if most working class children left school after the primary grades.) But speakers at the annual teachers’ institutes clearly affirmed the importance of inculcating aspirations for not merely faithful, but distinguished, service to the community, in the advanced grades. Thus Miss Sanford on the purpose of teaching history: “Another object in teaching history is to inspire a love for a noble life.” And later, again on the goals of teaching: to inculcate “Love of Success. By this we are led to contend for glory” (Schuylkill County Teachers’ Institute 1875).
But the ambience of respect for the economic hero was communicated, I believe, more directly outside the classroom, in the community of adults. Here was a world of more public symbols conveyed in public ceremonies, entertainments, books, and periodical literature, in which we can see deliberate efforts being made to articulate a merging of the image of military and economic or industrial patriotism and thus heroism.
The most conspicuous symbol of all was the Henry Clay monument. The Henry Clay monument was, and is, a colossal iron statue of the American statesman, set upon a cast iron Doric column, that stands sixty-six feet in total height from the base to the top of the head, and twice that above the main street of the town of Pottsville. It is visible from the north for miles, and dominates the…
to be continued….