This Week in Texas Methodist History   October 4, 2020

 

SMU President Selecman Stresses Heroes in Formal Opening Address, Fall Semester, 1935

 

The question “Whom should we honor?” has been thrust into public consciousness with the debate over statues and institutional names.   We only argue about matters of importance, and this issue has generated contentious confrontations in many states, so this is obviously an important question.

 

Should we continue to give public esteem to heroes of a previous generation, or does each generation have he right to show its admiration to new and different heroes?    A favorite question of a previous era was “Do men shape their times or do the times shape men?    Besides the obvious sexism of such a question, most of us would not even consider the question---but it was widely used in debating societies.  I do not propose to answer that question but will provide another perspective.,

 

The Confederate statues which are the center of the controversy were erected in an atmosphere in which individuals tended to be given more credit and blame than today.  Nowhere is the sentiment better illustrated than in Thomas Carlyle’s (1795-1881) On Heroes, Hero –Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841).    Included in that work is his assertion, “History is the biography of great men.” 

 

Few, if any historians, believe that assertion today.  Modern historical scholarship incorporates social, political, economic, institutional, and intellectual analyses in addition to biography—although biography is still a best selling genre.  A subset of that genre is demythologizing the “formerly great.”   A good example is Thomas Jefferson---one of the heroes of my youth whose sexual relations with the enslaved is now reliably documented., 

 

The “Great Man” theory of history was very influential in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  As I became interested in history, my father steered me toward biography in my reading.

 

President Charles Selecman chose a restatement of the theory when he addressed the assembly which opened the 1935  Fall Semester at SMU.   As part of his formal address he mentioned his list of heroes.  The list is very interesting.  It includes, Ghandi (sic), Chiang Kai Chek (sic), Einstein, Edward Bok, John R. Mott,  Sun Yat Sen,  Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, Ramsey MacDonald,  Masserik (sic), the Roosevelts,  President Eliot, Jane Addams, Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thos. Edison, and Luther Burbank. 

 

If the reader can identify all of those named, I want you as a partner on my next triva contest. 

 

 

Selecman said that the most important part of their university education was to develop character, and the best way to do that was to emulate the heroes such as he had listed.  Character education is still important in Christian higher education, but I hope we have found more ways of inculcating it than Selecman’s 1935 effort.