January 2011

Most Overrated Railroad Station:

Most Overrated Silent Film Star:

It would be wonderful to contemplate a time in which one could really choose an overrated silent film star, since so few are well enough known today to be that controversial. A few big names of the era are well known—Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Lillian Gish, et al.—but their work is the work of true genius, and they have been lucky enough to have their films remain accessible.

Many thanks for the great article on the America’s Cup. In the 1920s, at least in New England, reporting on the races was dominated by James B. Connolly. His sailing expertise and his narrative flair made him a renowned writer on the subject, but at least once it got out of hand.

On certain stretches of the contests the crews would lie face down on the decks to minimize wind resistance. As I remember Connolly’s most famous description, it went: “The yachts are both on the starboard tack, their crews lying flat on the decks, their bronze bottoms shining in the sun.”

Most Overrated Roadside Architecture:

Diners. They’ve been refurbished in recent years to look more streamlined than ever, more fifties than they were in the fifties. In fact, many were ptomaine palaces whose meals drove Americans to the dependability of standardized national fast-food chains. Today the reborn diners provide the visual equivalent of karaoke, mouthing the images of the past without the tune. Like those parodies of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks painting, they drip with yuppie irony. Their vast portions produce satiation at first sight; simply reading their immense menus can leave you feeling as full as if you’d already eaten a whole meal.

Most Underrated Roadside Architecture:

Most Overrated Racehorse:

Phar Lap. Thanks to our peculiar tendency to attribute every virtue to those who meet untimely deaths, the surest route to unqualified acclaim is to live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse. In 1932 an Australian racehorse named Phar Lap did just that, setting an American speed record for winning an overblown reputation. It took him only two minutes, two and fourfifths seconds, and he didn’t even do it in America.

Aptly named with the Singhalese term for lightning, the 1,450-pound red colossus was sent to the Agua Caliente racecourse, in Tijuana, Mexico, to challenge American horses in the track’s namesake race. He was splendid at Caliente, humiliating his rivals and setting a track record. Two weeks and a day later he was dead. Colic killed him, but a persistent Australian belief that Yanks had poisoned him led to many a brawl between Allied soldiers in World War II’s Pacific theater.

Most Overrated President:

Normally, the most overrated President would be James Madison, who let the British turn the White House into a barbecue pit. But in the wake of the end-of-century lists, the award must go to Franklin Roosevelt, hailed as the “savior of capitalism,” a flatulent phrase that is doubly wrong.

Saved it from whom? The Depression-era radicals—communists, socialists, Father Coughlin—were annoyances, whose candidates never got much more than 2 percent of the popular vote in a presidential election during the 1930s. Huey Long was a regional figure who would have flamed out if he had not been shot.

Saved it how? The mixture of improvisation and failure that was the New Deal kept the economy limping, until war production revived it. Roosevelt (and Hoover) took a recession and made it a catastrophe.

There remains the x factor of FDR’s spirits. Churchill said that meeting him was like opening one’s first bottle of champagne. But that only makes a bad domestic record mixed.

Most Overrated Public Relations Campaign:

Though its story is recounted again and again, the most overrated public relations campaign in American history was Edward Bernays’s 1929 campaign for the American Tobacco Company, which was designed to persuade women to smoke cigarettes in public.

In 1929, so the story goes, George W. Hill, the owner of American Tobacco, asked Edward Bernays to run a campaign intended to expunge the “hussy” label from women who smoked in public. Bernays, doubly the nephew of Sigmund Freud (his mother was Freud’s sister; his father was Freud’s wife’s brother), was known for his ability to appeal to people’s subconscious desires and seemed ideal for the task.

To prepare for the campaign, he consulted Freud’s friend the psychoanalyst A. A. Brill, who explained that “some women regard cigarettes as symbols of freedom.…More women now do the same work as men do.…Cigarettes, which are equated with men, become torches of freedom.”

Most Overrated Political Speech:

Most Overrated Pie:

Most Overrated Poet: