COLUMN ONE : U.S. Looks Abroad for Its Heroes : Americans offer adulation to foreigners such as Mandela, who seem to embody the heroic qualities lacking in the instant celebrities at home.

The faces in the crowd are the same: eager and expectant--that mixture of awe and hope in the gaze of people who have waited hours for a chance to touch the hand or hear the words of a hero.

Only the heroes have changed. The objects of Americans’ adulation have developed a distinctly foreign cast.

Over the last few months, Lech Walesa and Mikhail S. Gorbachev have made triumphal tours across America that no domestic figure seems able to equal.

Now it is Nelson Mandela--cheered by a million New Yorkers this week, showered by confetti in a ticker-tape parade on Broadway and saluted at rallies as he began a tour of America.

Is the American hero now an import?

For most of this century, American heroes have been just that--American. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Glenn--each excelled in a different sphere. But all were seen as embodying central aspects of the American character and were placed on the exalted platform that the nation reserves for its most admired figures.

In recent years, by contrast, America has been marked by a deep cynicism about its domestic political figures and institutions, said David Riesman, a retired Harvard social historian. In arenas as varied as sports, politics and entertainment, idols have turned out to have feet of clay.

At the same time, Americans in the final decade of the 20th Century are bombarded with celebrity, as Daniel J. Boorstin, formerly the librarian of Congress, noted in his book, “The Image.”

“Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused,” Boorstin wrote. “Yet we confuse them every day,” and “by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models.”

Because they are unable to identify real domestic heroes among the mass of instant celebrities, Americans naturally gravitate to foreigners who seem to display heroic characteristics such as courage, decisiveness and mastery of fate.

“There’s almost gratefulness to these people for existing,” Riesman said. “We still want to look up to people. We’re not as cynical as we sometimes like to make out we are.”

There are no exact measures of the breadth of these new heroes’ appeal. Each has tailored his U.S. visit to cities where his appeal would likely be greatest, as UC Berkeley political scientist Raymond E. Wolfinger noted.

Thus Polish labor leader Walesa visited Chicago, with its huge Polish-American community. Soviet President Gorbachev visited Minneapolis and San Francisco, two of the most liberal cities in the nation. South Africa’s Mandela is visiting a series of cities with large black populations.

The eagerness of national politicians to get close to the visitors, the attentiveness of the news media, the vast enthusiasm of the crowds and the results of public opinion polls all indicate that the impact has been real and considerable.

That impact has been possible because of both a dearth of home-grown heroes and a shift in how Americans view the nation’s position in the world.

The decline of home-grown heroes has many possible causes.

Boorstin argues that the cult of celebrity has drowned out the possibility of authentic heroes. The whirl of stars, each rising fast and most falling just as fast, along with the widespread commercialization of popular entertainment, have changed the way Americans view many aspects of mass culture.

Consider sports, to take one example. Basketball player Michael Jordan is probably the best-known sports star in the nation. Americans know him both as a player and as a commercial symbol for such products as Wheaties and Nike. He earns a huge income, far more than ever dreamed of by Babe Ruth or Joe DiMaggio. But neither Jordan nor any other athlete of today seems able to command the broad public affection that was lavished on Ruth and DiMaggio.

Few Frontiers

Those who conquered new frontiers traditionally became American heroes. Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson and “Buffalo Bill” Cody went west. Later heroes crossed the frontiers of air and space: Charles A. Lindbergh with his solo flight across the Atlantic, Glenn with the first American orbit of the Earth.

Today, those frontiers seem constrained, said Michael Lofaro of the University of Kentucky, who has studied heroes in American literature. Heroes are far harder to develop, he said, in an age when “the great man has been replaced by the machine.”

Political figures have provided another source of heroes in eras past. But, today, said historian William C. Leuchtenberg of the University of North Carolina, politics is dominated by “men in gray flannel suits” who simply fail to excite.

The only recent political figure who approached hero status is former President Ronald Reagan. In the latter part of his term, however, Reagan lost considerable standing because of the Iran-Contra scandal.

After leaving office, Reagan appears to have fallen victim to the defect that has plagued many other would-be American heroes--commercialization. The multimillion-dollar fee he received last year for a brief speaking tour in Japan detracted from his image as a man who transcended the worldly concerns of ordinary Americans.

The news media’s intense concentration on the private lives and scandals of popular figures may also play a role in knocking down American heroes as fast as they can rise.

Former Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado might never have become a heroic figure even if the press had not reported on his interest in women other than his wife during his 1988 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. But, as biographers have since disclosed, earlier political figures, such as President John F. Kennedy, had similar sexual peccadilloes that were not reported at the time.

The absence of domestic heroes leaves a void. As Riesman said, heroes are an essential part of every culture, reassuring the public that something exists that is larger than life.

Boundaries Fall

America’s changing role in the world has made that void easier to fill from abroad.

Foreign heroes are not entirely new. After a wave of mostly unsuccessful revolutions swept Europe in 1848, some of the leading insurrectionaries--the Lech Walesas of their day--toured America, the land of democracy and revolution, seeking support. Lajos Kossuth, the leader of Hungary’s failed attempt to free itself from Austria, attracted 100,000 people, who lined the railroad tracks from Columbus to Cleveland to cheer him as he toured Ohio, still a frontier state, in 1852.

A century later, Sir Winston Churchill became one of the most widely admired men in America for his brave leadership of Britain in the fight against Nazism.

Those events, however, have been exceptions. More often, Americans have been notable for a feeling that theirs was a country that would find little to learn and even less to admire in the “Old World.”

Indeed, those who were thought to cleave to non-American role models were often subjects of suspicion. During the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy was forced to defend himself against charges that his Roman Catholic faith would subject him to dictation from a foreign Pope. Jews were often suspected of possessing a dual loyalty to the United States and Israel that placed their patriotism under suspicion. During the height of the Cold War, that wariness of foreigners became entwined with fear of communism to produce a generalized suspicion of “outside influences” in much of American society.

That resistance appears to have faded, at least among substantial parts of the American population. An increased amount of travel abroad, widespread television pictures from overseas and the increased celebration of ethnic diversity at home have combined to make Americans more open to foreign concepts, said Berkeley’s Wolfinger.

At the same time, said Stanford sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, Americans once more see the world as being open to them and their values.

Until very recently, Mandela, for example, might have made many Americans nervous. Although American opinion generally has opposed apartheid for years, the African National Congress’ ties to the South African Communist Party and its guerrilla tactics made many Americans uneasy.

But now concerns about communism have sharply diminished. Even the leader of the Soviet Union, which no longer seems poised to launch its nuclear missiles, can be praised in the United States for pursuing greater freedom and openness--what many Americans see as “their values.”

Projection of those values onto a public figure is at the heart of how a hero is created. Throughout history, heroes have been concocted of fact mixed with large amounts of fantasy and hope. Indeed, one of the major deterrents to the development of new American heroes may be the relentlessness of the modern publicity apparatus, which renders nearly everything accessible and leaves almost nothing mysterious.

By contrast, although satellite television pictures and overseas newspaper correspondents bring foreign figures unprecedented amounts of public recognition within the United States, foreign leaders still remain sufficiently veiled behind a curtain of distance and unfamiliarity that they leave something to Americans’ imagination.

Skepticism Fades

When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, Americans initially viewed him as being cut from the same cloth as his predecessors, said Jeffrey C. Alexander, chairman of UCLA’s sociology department, who has studied the development of Gorbachev’s public image. Within the first year, however, Americans, and particularly their news organizations, began to describe Gorbachev as pragmatic, dynamic, informal, spontaneous and self-confident.

That in turn appears to have influenced American policy. Public confidence in Gorbachev has tempered domestic pressure on the Bush Administration to take a tough line with the Soviets over the Lithuanian crisis, for example. White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater attracted criticism when he referred to the Soviet leader last spring as a “drugstore cowboy,” and Bush now routinely praises Gorbachev.

The process has been even more striking in Mandela’s case.

“For the broad American public, we didn’t know who this man was,” said pollster and political consultant Paul Maslin. In the last few years, Mandela’s name became known to some Americans, particularly blacks, but little was known of his history. For nearly 28 years, his words and ideas had reached the outside world only sporadically and through the intermediaries who were allowed rare visits with him in prison.

Strangest of all in this video age, no one outside of a small circle of intimates had seen his face.

And then, in pictures watched by hundreds of millions of people around the globe, Mandela walked out of prison in a scene that almost perfectly recapitulated essential elements of ancient myths about heroes who dramatically return from long exile to save their people.

For most Americans, the specifics of Mandela’s ideas and the details of his policies remain obscure and, perhaps, not even relevant. When asked by reporters why they turned out to see him, people in the crowds commonly used a phrase that applies more to the United States than to Africa: civil rights.

For many Americans, black and white, Mandela has become “a 1990 version of Martin Luther King,” Maslin said.

That connection could become the key to how the country greets the African National Congress leader as his tour of the nation continues. Mandela began entering the American consciousness primarily as a hero for black Americans. He was part of a long tradition of ethnic heroes--nationalist leader Eamon de Valera for Irish-Americans earlier in this century, for example, and the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir for Jews.

More recently, however, Mandela has emerged as a hero with a broader reach. As an apostle of a future cleansed of racism, Mandela fills a void for many white Americans who, since King’s assassination in 1968, haven’t had “a black leader they can unambivalently admire,” said Anne Fabian, who teaches American studies at Yale University.

“Mandela makes us feel good about ourselves,” said UCLA’s Alexander. “He’s raising a dream of a multiracial society; that’s what we’re celebrating.

“We don’t know what the person is like, so we’re really thinking about our own society,” he said. “These heroes are projections of what we think they are or what we’d like to become. That’s why we create them.”