event that could have been left undone. The difficult problem is to discover when the “hero” is historical incident and when he is not.
An American dramatist with genuine philosophical insight once wrote a play called If Booth Had Missed. He develops the play in an imaginatively plausible fashion to conclude that if Booth had missed, someone else would not have missed. The dramatist was saying in his own way, not that Lincoln’s assassination was inevitable, but that it was symbolic of the fact that the Civil War had hardened the attitudes of the North to a point where no further compromises could be made. There is good historical evidence to warrant this judgment. Against a background of four years of bitter civil strife, no president, even one as different as Lincoln was from Andrew Johnson who tried to carry out Lincoln’s policies, could have withstood the desire on the part of the victorious states for harsh, rather than conciliatory, treatment of those whom they regarded as the authors of all their woes. If on the night of the fateful performance Lincoln had taken cold, stayed at home, and survived, it is unlikely that he would have succeeded where Johnson had failed. Had Lincoln died after a fruitless effort to convert the Radical Republicans to the ways of foresight and charity, his stature for posterity would have been cut down to that of Woodrow Wilson. The fate of Wilson indicates that the prestige of leading a war to a successful conclusion is not sufficient to cope with the problems of postwar reconstruction.
It follows from what we have said that heroic action can count decisively only where the historical situation permits of major alternative paths of development. The denial by social determinists of the orthodox Marxist school that heroic action can ever have a decisive influence on history is usually a corollary to the doctrine that the existing mode of economic production uniquely determines the culture on which it is based. According to them, from a given economic system, one and only one other economic system can develop. And on the basis of the economic system thus developed, one and only one culture—where “culture” designates the non-economic social institutions—can flourish. Where significant variations in the politics, art, religion, or philosophy are recognized, these must be explained “in the last analysis” in terms of the developmental changes of the economic system moved by its immanent “contradictions.” Heroes in such a conception can be found only in the interstices
