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Roses,
Roses all the Way by Vardis Fisher The
Idaho Statesman, January 4, 1943
The press the other day carried a brief announcement of the death of
Thomas Neibaur and the name perhaps meant nothing to most of those who read it.
Neibaur, from Sugar City, Idaho, was one of the 87 who won the
Congressional Medal in the last war. He
was the only Idahoan who received the highest honor his country could award.
When I read of Tom's death my mind went back first to the last time I saw
him. It was early in 1938 and he
came into my office in Boise, a dirty and starved and ragged man, and asked for
a job. Because he had had little
formal education I could not give him a job on that project but I hiked over to
lay his case before Barzilla Clark. The
Governor said he would give Neibaur a job in the statehouse or the highway
department -- and so far as I know, he did.
God knows Neibaur needed it; he had a family and he was starving.
And then memory went back across a quarter of a century to that day of
pomp and glory when Tom Neibaur came back from the war.
Of all names in Idaho, his was on most tongues that day.
His was the hand that everybody wanted to shake; he was the man to whom
everybody wanted to give a job. I've
no notion how many hands and flags and orators turned out; but I believe the
Governor and other state dignitaries were here, as well as all the windjammers
from eastern Idaho. It was roses,
roses all the day under the feet of Tom Neibaur; it was rhetoric with a
vengeance from the rostrum; it was sweet flattery and handshaking and a banquet
and more speeches. Soon
Forgotten
Robert Browning has a bitter poem to such a hero.
"It was roses, roses all the way, and myrtle mixed in my path like
mad" -- but a year later it was oblivion.
A year later nobody remembered the hero whose name had been on every
tongue that day. He was as
forgotten as the last year's flowers and nobody cared.
But for the Browning hero and for Neibaur life had only begun and it was
to be a bitter and empty life.
Flattery turns the heads of the best of us.
Of Neibaur's life after that day of roses, the less said the better; but
whatever his life was, the fault was not his.
When he went to war he was only a simple lad from a village -- a lad, as
it turned out, of most uncommon physical courage.
He did his job well. He
fought for his country and he fought so well that he won its highest honor and
the loud and empty acclaim of his own state.
Then, as if he had been only a fad, he was dismissed and forgotten and
the other day he died while still young.
Neibaur's life from the day he came back until the day he died is a
parable of ironic and blistering commentary on human nature.
Here was a man who fought bravely and was sacrificed for it.
He was sacrificed to the insincere and vulgar egoism of his fellows -- to
the blatant rhetoricians who shouted his name on that long-ago day.
Because, don't you see, they were not really interested in Neibaur; they
were interested in the pretext he gave them to get up and shout windy
nothingness, and strut their little part on a day of glory that was not their
own. Perhaps they did not realize
that all the fuss they were making would almost wreck a hero's life.
If they had realized it, perhaps they would not have cared. Victim
of Egotists
It has been this way with heroes since the first one, and it is so still.
It is especially this way in this land of romantic and sentimental
people. A hero is little more than
an excuse for a lot of extroverted vulgarians to exhibit themselves --
including, to be sure, all the politicians who make of it a field day. When Lindbergh came back from Paris, hundreds of thousands
fought not to do him homage but to be seen at his side. A careful study of photographs of those mad throngs is enough
to turn your stomach. Lindbergh was
there, a shy and bewildered and unhappy person; but it is not Lindbergh who
captures and holds your attention. It
is the triumphant and grinning faces of egoists who jumped into the limelight
and fancied themselves as the heroes of the parade.
Of such shallow and vicarious exhibitionism this nation has made a major
industry with the Hollywood crowd as its chief stooges.
Fetch one of those mediocrities to an American city and those with
neither taste nor dignity nor perspective on themselves stampede to the stage of
action and fight for the emptiness of a vicarious thrill.
If you can't achieve in your own right, then try to shine in the light of
somebody else -- and the more artificial the light, the better a lot of
Americans like it.
Forgotten heroes of the last war seem to have taught us nothing.
We seem, indeed, to have descended to a more vulgar level. It is true, of course, in time of war that we need vivid
consciousness of those things that sustain morale; but it does not follow that
we need to seize heroes from the firing line and rush them back here and parade
them like monkeys up and down the country.
Yet that is what we have been doing, and it has reached such excesses of
vulgarity that some of the heroes have rebelled in disgust.
They have asked to get out of the cheap parade and go back to the front.
In any vulgarity there is worth. There
is vitality and zest behind the histrionic empty gestures; there is childlike
naivete that may be good. But it
would seem that in this country we have rather too much of it -- too much that
is unconsciously brutal and that sometimes destroys the very persons it
applauds. Lindbergh did not flee to England for vain and idle reasons.
He fled from a nationwide epidemic of bad taste.
Genuine heroes are nearly always shy persons who don't like the spotlight
and all the infernal hullabaloo. If
we admire them and are proud of them, then we ought to try to be decent to them.
We can show our gratitude in better ways than with bands and flags and
rhetorical windbags. Hero
Overlooked
When Idaho's school kids were asked to suggest a name for a new
battleship, perhaps not one of them thought of Neibaur.
Very possibly not a one of them had ever heard of him.
The only honor, so far as I know, that this state has ever awarded to
Neibaur is that frenzied orgy of bands and ranting when he returned. On that day he could have had practically anything in the
power of Idaho to give; but when we sought the name for a new cruiser, the
state's great hero of World War I lay forgotten and dying, and his children were
far away from him in a pauper's home. Page last updated: 14 June 2000 |
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