Courage as a rare commodity

Henry H. H. Remak   Photo by Heather Hill

The people I will be talking about in this column would, first of all, share one qualifying characteristic: they would not want to be called "heroic."

Our leveling media culture has debased the term by bestowing "heroic" headlines on anyone who has done something positively spectacular like "saving" a basketball game (thrilling and needed as this is, especially for our Hoosiers). The principal meaning of the Greek heros coming from battle, is someone who has deliberately risked his (or, as with Joan of Arc in later years, her) life for the sake of a higher purpose, be it honor, faith, "polis," country, friend or neighbor.

Modern heroism is one more of character, of civic rather than personal courage, of taking on worthy but often risky causes, of braving popularity polls, and powerful "public opinion" pressures.

In 1956, Herbert Lehman, one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's closest friends, his successor as governor of New York and subsequently U.S. senator from his state, was asked, upon his voluntary retirement from the senate, what the essential qualities of a senator were. He replied, as I recall it: "Hard work, intelligence, courage. But courage is the rarest of the three."

A year before, in 1955, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, then U.S. senator from Massachusetts, celebrated, in his Profiles in Courage, eight U.S. senators who had the courage of their convictions. In it, he cited Edmund Burke's praise of Charles James Fox pronounced in the House of Commons on Dec. 1, 1783:

"He has put to hazard his ease, his security, his interest, his power, and even his popularity."

These will be my watermarks for the heroism of our times.

Three of my profiles are integral ingredients of my own experience at IU. So I will start with the one I never talked to. I saw, heard and observed her, however, from close range when she gave a convocation address at the IU Auditorium in Bloomington on Jan. 13, 1950.

Eleanor Roosevelt and Herman B. Wells on the IU Campus, 1950 Photo courtesy of IU Photographic Services

Because it was filled to capacity, we got to sit on stage. Thus not only seeing and hearing her but feeling her proximity. She was, frankly, not the epitome of what was stressed in women by skin-deep "culture" at that time: "beauty, allure." She was unusually tall for a woman, gangling, had buck teeth and a squeaky voice. Never mind. She was the complete woman: wife, for 40 years, of a man struck by devastating disease in the prime of his married life, mother of six, dealing with dignity and humanity with marriage and parent problems, hostess to the great and mighty of the world for 12 years, an independent but responsible pioneer, supported by her husband in bringing to the attention of the nation, and later the world, without fanfare and hoopla, the existential problems of the low and obscure of society, never posing, genuine to the core: Eleanor Roosevelt.

Now to IU. During all my 62 years here, first as a student, then as a teacher, I have been the contemporary and, for most of it, the friend of Herman B Wells.

It is difficult to say anything new and fresh about him because he has been idolized by just about everybody for half a century and more. But, with all of his other qualities, I want to emphasize his "quiet courage" in risking the loss of short-term but, to presidents of thinner quality, indispensable popularity by his farsighted, pragmatic vision of what was then a fine but, with shining exceptions, essentially regional university of 5,000 students becoming a national and international academic center. Hailing from a Hoosierland rootedness of several generations which he as always cherished, from a banking background, he unabashedly (and not just for the record) championed and practiced the value of the arts and the intellect.

Alfred C. Kinsey Photo courtesy of IU Archives

My remaining two heroes are directly linked to Wells, who came to their defense when pressures on academic freedom during the McCarthy period would have inhibited a lesser president. The better known of my two choices is Alfred C. Kinsey, professor of zoology at IU from 1920 to his death in 1956. Kinsey was a man of the most taxing intellectual courage. He had established a secure scientific reputation with his study of the gall wasp, which he put at risk when he embarked on a systematic and comprehensive analysis of human sexual behavior--a largely uncharted minefield of gigantic proportions. Contrary to some recent portrayals, Kinsey was not a dogged zealot but--as I experienced him from close range--a marvelously generous man with an unforgettable, radiant smile. He is, in substantive part, responsible for the fairer, kinder and gentler assessment of diverse sexual behavior that is one of the major cultural accomplishments of the second part of the 20th century.

Wells came to Kinsey's defense as early as the initial phase of Kinsey's research, years before Kinsey had established a solid if contested fame in the scholarly as well as general culture of the world. The fact that Wells did so, in truly Wellsian fashion, by accentuating the positive in Kinsey's work rather than castigating the negative critics, takes not a whit from Wells' seasoned courage: he has always persuaded rather than lambasted the other side.

The third and not as widely known of my "profiles in courage" is Ralph F. Fuchs, professor of law at IU Bloomington from 1945 to 1985, interrupted by two crucial years, overlapping with the McCarthy period, of defending academic freedom as general secretary of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), 1955-1957.

Ralph F. Fuchs Photo courtesy of IU Archives

He, too, honored me with his friendship. Wells never wavered in protecting him when the AAUP persisted, as did and does the American Civil Liberties Union, in its stand that the sole fact of being a Communist or of any other "extreme" persuasion, left or right, is not, in itself, sufficient reason to penalize an academic (or anyone else) in a society based on freedom of speech and belief.

Ralph Fuchs was and is, for me, the model of a truly good man of uncompromising integrity.

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