January 2011

Overrated She said that calling Warren Harding “second rate” was “one of the biggest compliments anyone can pay him,” that Calvin Coolidge seemed to have been “weaned on a pickle,” and that Thomas E. Dewey looked like the “bridegroom on a wedding cake.” Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore Roosevelt’s irrepressible eldest daughter, wielded a wicked wit. She also suffered from an insatiable lust for the limelight, a tiresome propensity for lifelong grudges, and an arrested development.

True, her childhood was grim. Her mother died two days after she was born, and her father sometimes forgot to include her when speaking of the family of five children he had with his second wife. But Alice went on making trouble well into her nineties, long after the statute of limitations had run out.

Overrated Reform itself, at least its nineteenth-century version. That’s not to suggest that reforms were not needed or were doomed to futility as a counter to the corrupt urban political machines of the mid- and late 180Os. But the reformers who have been accorded historical halos were motivated by a good deal more than a desire to rid City Hall of thieving political bosses. Reform in those days had a tinge of ugly nativism about it. James Harper, an aristocratic publishing executive, was elected mayor of New York in 1844 as a reformer, but he also ran an explicitly anti-immigrant campaign. E. L.Godkin, founder of The Nation and one of reform’s most prominent voices, knew: Government ought to be in the hands of “thoughtful, educated, high-minded men” and not, you can be sure, of any huddled masses.

Overrated There are times when the overrated is obvious, and all one can do is wince. Anyone who sat through Maya Angelou’s inauguration drivel will understand what I mean. In their day the celebrity of a Carl Sandburg and an Allen Ginsberg covered over the slim poetic gift of each. It is plain that such poets, if they are remembered at all, will be footnotes in a history of social change, not of literature. The reputations of worthier poets ebb and flow with the restless tides of taste. A poet like Edna St. Vincent Millay was considered shocking in the 1920s and 50 years later was dismissed as sentimental. When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow died in 1882, he was the most popular and beloved poet in the Englishspeaking world. A century later he was mocked and unread.

Overrated

The irony of his fate is almost too cruel. Captain Kidd has gone down in legend and history as a vicious cutthroat who buried treasure all along the Eastern seaboard. Howard Pyle’s famed illustrations made him out to be a swarthy mustachioed rogue, draped in pistols and cutlass. Actually, Capt. William Kidd (1645-1701) was a respectable New York sea captain born in Scotland, a war hero who tried unbelievably hard to fulfill his commission to capture pirates and bring back their treasure. He genuinely hoped that his voyage aboard the Adventure Galley would turn out to be both patriotic and profitable, but his crew mutinied and his lordly backers abandoned him. His later trial in London was a sham; his hanging close to judicial murder.

Underrated I’ll have to go along with my buddy Keller, who called Jack Elam “the greatest bad guy who ever got in front of a camera”—and, I might add, a hell of a nice fellow in private life. But now that Keller’s spread the word, I don’t know that he’s underrated any more. Two of the most chilling performances I’ve ever seen might well qualify, however. One is that of Donald Pleasence in Will Penny , a sweetheart of a movie, and the other is Robert Mitchum’s hymn-singing killer in The Night of the Hunter . Couldn’t you just see those two as Big Harpe and Little Harpe, probably the two most chilling real-life villains, but that’s another category, isn’t it?

Overrated Well, it’s no reflection on the actors, but the villains in the various James Bond movies never gave me a turn. Caricatures just aren’t all that menacing.

Overrated Any novel published, to critical acclaim, during the last 50 years that “reveals the torment” of the dysfunctional American middle-class family. Despite all the whining self-therapy (failed, failed !) in prose, and the apocalyptic warnings that suburban marriage, especially, is a doomed institution, the American family looks a lot stronger these days than does the American novel. Now, family dysfunction is real enough, but the Book of Genesis did a perfectly satisfying job of nailing it in short-story format (“Uh, Mom, Abel just had an accident out in the field ... can I have an apple?”), and King Lear said anything additional that wanted saying, and it’s time for our self-important, pity-mebecause-my-mommy-yelled-at-me scribblers of fiction to do a Huck Finn and head out for territory that ain’t so civilized . . .

Overrated There are any number of Indian leaders in the pantheon of American history who vie for this doubtful distinction—for instance, the irascible Lakota medicine man Sitting Bull, who got so much more credit than he deserves for the destruction of Custer’s command, immediately leaps to mind—but in the end 1 believe the award for most overrated Indian leader must go to Tecumseh (1768P-1813). Without doubt a highly intelligent and charismatic influence among the tribes of North America, the Shawnee leader pleaded for unity among the tribes from the Midwest to Florida and rejected the degeneracy of encroaching white civilization. A man of strong moral fiber and a superb orator, he clashed with the territorial governor William Henry Harrison and finally joined with the British and briefly ravaged the Northwest during the War of 1812. But the fierce campaign against the United States ended with Tecumseh’s death at the Battle of the Thames. White and Indian relations suffered for decades afterward, and the resulting legacy of fear, mistrust, and betrayal can be laid squarely at Tecumseh’s door.

Overrated The Scarlet Letter . At the very whisper of the title, of course, I see 10,000 high school teachers rise up and shake their gory locks at me. For three generations at least, American schoolchildren have been introduced to their literary heritage through Hawthorne’s grim and thoroughly unwholesome novel about the adulteress Hester Prynne, her bad-tempered husband, Chillingworth, and the insipid, repressive, and well-named Reverend Dimmesdale. The book is a tribute to “the power of blackness” in our national psyche, one famous Harvard scholar says. It is, Henry James thought in a moment of critical disequilibrium, America’s “finest piece of imaginative writing.”

Overrated “With malice toward none ; with charity for all. ” The best-remembered, most frequently quoted phrase from Lincoln’s extraordinary Second Inaugural Address was actually “off message,” as media gurus might put it today. In its totality *he speech was a fire-and-brimstone condemnation of the evils of slavery, punctuated by a breathtaking biblical threat: “Woe unto the world because of offences!” The phrase—and it must have truly startled the audience on March 4, 1865—was Lincoln’s blunt warning that the Civil War would continue until “every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” At the end the President abruptly switched gears to conclude with his kinder and gentler call to “bind up the nation’s wounds,” but the real message of the Second Inaugural was sacrifice and retribution, not charity.