W.E.B. DuBois: "Perfect" Heroes

Americans love a flawless hero...a perfect story...a happy ending...an easy myth over difficult reality. These are the challenges and difficulties we face each day in our class as we struggle with "how we want our coffee (history)"...straight or with cream and sugar?

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewzrit2mMLM (7:31)

 

We are not the first to struggle with this reality and we will definitely not be the last...W.E.B. DuBois dealt with "the struggle for truth" while he critically examined Abraham Lincoln in this September of 1922 excerpt:

 

We love to think of the Great as flawless. We yearn in our imperfection toward Perfection–sinful, we envisage Righteousness. As a result of this, no sooner does a great man die than we begin to whitewash him. We seek to forget all that was small and mean and unpleasant and remember the fine and brave and good. We slur over and explain away his inconsistencies and at last there begins to appear, not the real man, but the tradition of the man–remote, immense, perfect, cold and dead!
This sort of falsehood appeals to some folk. They want to dream their heroes true; they want their heroes all heroic with no feet of clay; and they are astonished, angered, hurt if some one speaks the grim, forgotten truth...First and foremost, there comes a question of fact. Was what I said true or false? This I shall not argue. Any good library will supply the books, and let each interested reader judge. Beyond this, there is another and deeper question...

 

“Is this proper food for your people?"

 

I think it is...that is the very reason for telling the Truth!