MADALYN MURRAY O'HAIR, the angry atheist, may well have more religious fervor than anyone since Cotton Mather. Her fervor is aimed at making sure that reports of God's death are not exaggerated. Spouting the Constitution as Scripture, she has forced the Supreme Court to ban compulsory public-school prayers, threatened the tax exemption on church property, and is currently protesting the astronauts' moonside recitation of Genesis last Christmas Eve. "I'm no eccentric," she said recently. "I'm the leader of a valid movement."
The denial was not convincing, but it raises the question of what an eccentric is in modern America—and how many of them there are. What primarily distinguishes an eccentric, says Harvard Sociologist Peter McEwan, is that he is "extraordinarily secure. Other people are either wrong or going about life ineffectually. He thinks that he has the answer." That definition might equally fit Atheist O'Hair ("I will separate church and state, by God"), Hugh Hefner, Admiral Hyman Rickover—or Sirhan Sirhan. In fact, genuine eccentricity generally stops far short of pathological conduct. According to McEwan, the real thing is deviant behavior that does not require society to do anything about the behavior.
Between Two Conformities
An earlier America seemed to have many eccentrics, such as Johnny Appleseed and Thoreau, both of whom heard "a different drummer." The Boston Brahmins produced Eleonora Sears, a ferocious walker who once hiked 110 miles nonstop. Mrs. Isabella Gardner shocked Beacon Hill by practicing Buddhism, drinking beer and strolling down Tremont Street with a lion. Until he died in 1957, "Silver Dollar" Jim West was Houston's favorite millionaire. He owned 30 cars, lived in a $500,000 castle, often wore a pistol and a diamond-studded Texas Ranger's badge. He lugged his own butter to expensive restaurants and carried up to 80 silver dollars for tips.
Where are the Wests, the Thoreaus, the Gardners of today? Some claim that eccentricity is vanishing in America, Mrs. O'Hair notwithstanding. Appearance mav seem to belie this conclusion, since the age abounds with beards, long hair, acidheads and nude actresses. Skeptics argue, however, that all this is actually more conformity than eccentricity. As they see it, urbanization has freed Americans from many small-town strictures but has left millions of young people yearning for acceptance in new groups—the hippies, for example—that create their own standards. "Eccentricity," says New York Sociologist Werner Cahnman, "frequently becomes only the transition between two conformities."