er any real danger in allowing a pedestal
for a real hero. He never has time to sit on it.

One sees him always over and over again kicking his pedestal out from
under him and using it to batter a world with. As the world does not
take to enjoying its heroes' pedestals in this way, a pedestal is quite
safe. Most people feel the same about a hero's halo. They prefer to have
him wear it like a kind of glare around his head, and if he uses it as a
searchlight upon them, if he makes his halo really practical and lights
up the world a little around him instead, he is not likely to be
spoiled, is almost always safe from any danger of having any more halo
crowded upon him than he wants, or than anybody wants him to have. One
might put it down as a motto for heroes, "Keep your halo busy and it
won't hurt you." Modern democracy will never have a chance of being what
it wants to be as long as it keeps on throwing away great natural forces
like halos and pedestals. There is no reason why we should not believe
in halos and pedestals, not to wear or stand on, but when used strictly
for butting and seeing purposes.

We may know a real hero by the fact that we always have to keep
rediscovering him. One knows the real hero by the fact that in his
relation to people who put him on a pedestal he is always kicking his
pedestal away and substituting his vision.

There is something about any real heroism that we see to-day which makes
heroes out of the people who see it, A real hero has his back to the
people and the crowd looks over his shoulders with him at his work and
he feels behind him daily, with joy and strength, thousands of heroes
pressing up to take his place. And he is daily happy with a strange,
mighty, impersonal joy in all these other people who could do it, too.
He lives with a great hurrah for the world in his heart. The hero he
worships is the hero he sees in others. A man like this would feel
cramped if he were merely being himself, or if he were being imprisoned
by the people in his own glory, or were being cooped up into a hero.

It is in this sense that I have finally come again to believe that hero
worship is safe, that in some form as one of the great elemental
energies in human nature it must be saved, that it must be regulated and
used, that it has an incalculable power which was meant to be turned on
to run a nation with.

And I believe that Thomas Jefferson, confronted in this desperate,
sublime 1913, with t