No More Great Men
Abandon the oversimplified telling of history
As a kid weekend mornings looked like reading in bed until my stomach grew too loud to ignore, and it was almost always one type of book getting my attention. The novels I’d run through typically had a heroic child, a teenage wizard, a young super spy saving the world. A remarkable percentage of time the fate of the world (or even the known universe) hung on how one twelve-year-old responded to immense danger and uncertainty. Again and again the hero would swing the pendulum of history, single-handedly saving our species.
During the week I’d go to school and learn something oddly similar in history class. I’d learn that the great shifts in human society were brought about by one or two prominent, and very special, individuals. Today I hear that this sort of thinking, known as Great Man Theory, is largely debunked in the Ivory Tower, but when I was growing up it hadn’t yet been debunked in middle school classrooms. The academic debunking presumably claims, quite rightly, that history doesn’t rest fully on the decisions of a handful of great people, let alone great men. Shifting conditions (like plagues or changes in global temperatures, for example) play a pretty large role in shaping society. And, beyond that, wars and social movements and waves of change rely on thousands and millions of people, not just a few great leaders.
Intellectually, the updated understanding sounds right. The Civil Rights Movement wasn’t just Martin Luther King Jr., and hopefully kids these days are being taught a more accurate history that includes multiple organizations with thousands of members. Hopefully classes today convey an understanding that it took millions of Black folks across the South and across the country, along with non-Black accomplices, to win desegregation and other victories of the movement. I certainly was taught, not just in classes but through the cultural narrative developed after King’s assassination, that this one great man was the fulcrum on which the Civil Rights Movement swung.
It’s in the water, this Great Man Theory. MLK has a day named after him — there is no day for the movement or the mass organizations that powered it. It feeds us easier stories, this way of thinking, it feeds us a watered-down and more digestible narrative. Latching on to the arc of one person, who in fairness was often bold and visionary and great, is easier than understanding the multiple organizations and players that collectively built transformation. It’s easier than understanding the decades that led up to change. And, in some ways, it’s easier than accepting that real seismic shifts in society almost always take the action of thousands or millions of people.
But thinking of history as a progression of great or uniquely powerful individuals serves to let us off the hook; it’s demobilizing. It’s natural to think, after a lifetime of history and stories about exceptional people lifted onto pedestals, that we can’t do all that much. We’re not heroes, we’re normal people. What we ought to do is sit and wait around for the right leader to arrive. Then, we’ll join their march. Then, we’ll know how we’re supposed to engage in the work of changing history. Then, we’ll play our part in our proper place behind the hero who will one day be remembered.
In the meantime, we sit at home. In the meantime, we go about our days. It’s frightening to be jostled out of this Great Man understanding. It’s frightening to be told that history doesn’t move solely on the coattails of a few special individuals, and that we’re required to join in the action here and now, not just once the messiah has come. It’s true that the history books will likely never list all of us, in our thousands and in our millions, but a history worth writing still requires all of us. As Ella Baker, one of the Civil Rights heroes who is too often a footnote said, “I have always thought that what is needed is the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership in others.”
Baker helped start the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), organizations without which the Civil Rights Movement as we know it would not have existed. She helped mentor countless organizers, and worked alongside people whose names have been given more pages in our textbooks. She herself is given less space in our history for many reasons, being a Black woman among them. But one reason that I admire endlessly is that she didn’t crave the spotlight. She’s known for comments like “My theory is, strong people don’t need leaders” and “The major job was getting people to understand that they had something within their power that they could use, and it could only be used if they understood what was happening and how group action could counter violence.”
Howard Zinn says that Baker was “more responsible than any other single individual for the formation of the new abolitionists [SNCC] as an organized group.” I don’t know if she’d want that accolade, or not. Baker very clearly wanted us all to lead, wanted us all to seize our agency, organize, and act. She prescribed an antidote to the demobilizing Great Man way of thinking, and masses of people took her up on it. In addition to the renowned organizers she inspired, countless people whose names are either lost to history or are only to be found deep in the archives listened to what she had to say. These people changed the course of history, and we should understand that they collectively changed it just as much or more than any household name.
It’s not easy to snap out of waiting for the hero to arrive. It’s not easy to think that the heavy task of moving history also rests on our shoulders, instead of squarely on the shoulders of some great leader. From ancient stories like the Odyssey to the many lesser substitutes we have now we’re programmed to think that narratives revolve around one person. But the need to deprogram this way of understanding how history unfolds, and conceptualizing how the world works, is urgent. And there’s nothing like action to rewire our brains. There’s nothing like organizing in your community or on the job to see that it takes all of us doing our part, that it takes each of us contributing what we can to make change.
As Diane di Prima writes, “NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.” It takes all of us, all of us doing everything we can to topple oppression and build something better in its place. And as we go maybe we’ll learn to tell a different type of story, a story with more than one hero.
Here’s a great book about Ella Baker if you’d like to learn more. It’s called ”Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement” by Barbara Ransby: https://uncpress.org/book/9780807856161/ella-baker-and-the-black-freedom-movement/
Thank you again, and happy reading - JP
Thanks for this important post, Joshua.
Two things occurred to me as I read it. For one, the 'great man' theory still lives in the hearts and minds of so many.
Take most situations between a man and a woman today: the man will be considered blameless while the woman will have been the villain/seductress/fill in the blank. Men so often come out smelling like roses, even when they were the ones at fault.
Second, and I almost credit this new myth with fuelling the popularity of Trump, is the buffoon who always succeeds, as shown in numerous movies: Dumb and Dumber, Forest Gump for example. I detest these kinds of movies so can't name many, but it seems to be a recurring theme these days. These men win the day in spite of themselves.
I wish we'd credit movements and not automatically assume it was the efforts of one or two very special men who were responsible for positive outcomes.
This makes me think about how we create a great leader in our minds and make him into this mythic man who does no wrong. There really is no “great man” so to speak. There are always skeletons in their closet, it is only natural, we are only human. We really do become complacent in our fight waiting for someone to make the first move. Forgetting that real change starts within us. Which is why it is really best to hear from the thousands or millions that work together to bring change. We really should teach one another to not be afraid to take on or adopt leadership skills. Through numbers we can strive for more and build interwoven strong communities.