January 2011

Most Overrated Novel:

Moby-Dick . Call me Philistine. I think Moby-Dick is a great crashing bore of a novel. The problem is that it is actually three books in one. It is a sea story, an extended treatise on whaling, and a work of moral philosophy. As a sea story it is hard to beat—crazy captains, crazy whales, you name it—but the endless details on whaling often get in the way of the narrative flow. As for the moral philosophy, I will admit to being totally immune to its charms. Even worse for its standing as a novel, the moral philosophy aspect tends to make the characters more paradigmatic than human. And the one thing a great novel must have is real characters the reader can relate to. Ask Jane Austen, Stephen Crane, or Graham Greene. But have you ever met a Captain Ahab?

Most Overrated Newspaper Headline:

Most Overrated Naval Battle:

Virginia Capes, 1781. Could any action have a higher rating than that which sealed the fate of British North America? But did it? Certainly area sea control was decisive. Lord Cornwallis had marched his troops to Yorktown, where the York River broadens into Chesapeake Bay, in order to open communications by sea with the British main base, New York. Gen. George Washington, marching south with his French ally, Rochambeau, would need to cross the wide waters of the bay to reach Yorktown—plainly impossible if opposed by hostile naval forces. Meanwhile, a French squadron of eight ships of the line was sailing south from Newport, Rhode Island, with Washington’s siege guns.

Most Overrated National Turning Point:

As a former “rag-sailor” and yacht racer on Lake Superior, I very much enjoyed John Rousmaniere’s story “The America’s Cup” (February). As a writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer back in the 1950s, I did some research then on that race and discovered a nice story about Sir Thomas Lipton (mentioned in Rousmaniere’s story as the challenger and loser of five America’s Cup races). After Lipton’s fifth and final defeat in 1930, as I recall, a sympathizer tried to console the venerable British yachtsman by telling him that it was obvious that the Americans were “putting something in the water.” Wearily, the gallant sportsman replied, “Yes, madam, they are. It’s a better boat.”

Ken Chowder expends considerable effort in glossing over some of the uglier aspects of Brown’s life and career, but his most offensive passage contains the attempt to justify the Pottawatomie murders by claiming that Brown “was a violent man, but he lived in increasingly violent times.” We dwell in an age that is enormously more violent than the 185Os, yet I don’t believe any rational person today (including Chowder) would seek to sanctify someone who commits such bloody, heinous acts in even the most righteous of causes.

Chowder quotes the historian Paul Finkelman as saying that “Brown is simply part of a very violent world,” as though that somehow mitigated the horror of his deeds. Well, we all are part of a violent world, Mr. Chowder, but fortunately for you, I’m not about to pick up a sword and go off in search of those who offend me.

I find your cover story in the February/March 2000 issue offensive in both title and content. Calling John Brown the Father of American Terrorism not only is untrue but masks the real fathers of terrorism in the United States.

American terrorism did emerge in the Kansas Territory during the 185Os, at least as a national phenomenon, but it came into being as a “state authority crime,” in which the U.S. government sponsored Southern whites in a terrorist campaign against the freesoil (Northern) settlers.

The free-soilers constituted the great majority of the territorial population from the very beginning, yet they found themselves with no control over their own destiny. Instead they faced Washington politicians and the politicians’ local mercenaries, the Border Ruffians, both determined to impose slavery on Kansas. These criminals stopped at nothing. Their terrorism included arson and cold-blooded murder as well as vote stealing and the total suppression of free speech and civil liberties in the territory.

Most Overrated Movie Classic:

Most Overrated Military Quotation:

It has to be one of the very few instances in which Douglas MacArthur referred to himself in anything but the third person. “I shall return,” he muttered upon arriving in Australia. When the Office of War Information asked him to rephrase the pledge in the more inclusive first-person plural, the general refused. As Stephen H. Ambrose has noted, “The emphasis on ’I’ became more pronounced as the war went on.”

Most Underrated Military Quotation:

As various historians have pointed out, “Follow me” is a more effective exhortation than “Go take that hill” in small-unit actions. But military history’s bread and butter is the big picture and the larger-than-life figures who move the pieces across the board while barking out pithy or gutsy orders that could have been, and often were, written by public relations men.

Most Overrated Musical Tradition:

The singer-songwriter tradition. What’s more American than a kid named Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota, reinventing himself—taking the name of a Welsh poet and copying the style of a Depression-era folksinger? After Bob Dylan took his guitar case on the road to New York, however, in addition to writing some nice songs, he inspired an earnest army of guitar poets who took a dubious message from his example: that songs had to be homemade in order to be deeply, authentically felt by their listeners. The singer-songwriter movement was born, with its credo that a song’s value was morally tied up with its authorship by the singer (however clumsily constructed or performed). Generational distrust about the corporate music business elevated the raw, sincere singer.