Most Overrated Founding Father:
I assume that Founding Fathers means five people: Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. They all had weaknesses, but I find it hard to say that any of them is overrated in public recognition, unless it be in the silly judicial quest for their “original intent.”
Most Overrated Military Aircraft:
At the risk of ridicule, I’d say the B-17. This was in many respects a great plane, but measured against its designers’ claims, it was a dud. First, the whole point of the Flying Fortress is captured by the name, but, in fact, B-17s could not fly unescorted bombing runs against Axis fighters and were lost in horrifying numbers when they tried (at Schweinfurt, etc.). Second, the B-17 was designed to achieve pinpoint accuracy and couldn’t. So by comparing the end product with the plane specified by the Air Force and described by the designers and manufacturer, we find the B-17 profoundly overrated.
Most Underrated Military Aircraft:
Most Overrated Magician:
You’re expecting me to say Houdini. Why? Because Houdini is the only magician in American history you can name. And possibly you’ve heard technically slick but charisma-free modern would-be rivals of Houdini say, “Oh, Houdini was a great publicist, but only a mediocre magician.”
Such posers are not fit to lick the flyspecks off Houdini’s handbills.
Most Overrated Humorist:
Here, I’m sorry to say, is my grandfather’s favorite joke: An elderly couple used to wear the same pair of dentures on alternate days. One evening the wife comes home from a tea party and hands the dentures over to her husband. The husband snaps them into place and then sits for a moment, smacking his lips.
“Goody, goody!” he exclaims. “Macaroons!”
Perhaps we should not pass judgment on our ancestors’ laughter, for nothing ages faster than humor. Nevertheless I nominate for most overrated American humorist Charles Farrar Browne (1834–67), a failed reporter who inexplicably stole the name of my Revolutionary War relation. As “Artemus Ward” he wrote interminable pieces in a tortured Irishy dialect that apparently delighted not just the Know-Nothings of the mid-nineteenth century but such better angels as Lincoln and Twain.
Most Overrated Gangster:
Al Capone. It’s amazing what a hit TV series and a few popular movies can do for a guy’s image. Al Capone and Eliot Ness are inextricably locked together in the mythology of twentieth-century American gang warfare, yet they never met and had practically nothing to do with each other. Capone, of course, made Ness famous, not the other way around. Capone was the best-known gangster in America in his own lifetime, and no one knew the name of Eliot Ness until Robert Stack played him on television. But it’s altogether possible that Capone’s fame would have faded by the sixties.
Most Overrated Folk or Self-taught Artist:
Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses (1860-1961) fills the bill for two reasons. First, a lot of people’s grandmothers who can’t really paint, paint like her. Second, many of the “memory” views of rural life during the Reconstruction era of her New York youth, painted during the decade of television and Sputnik , became the model for the torrent of mediocre, maplesyrupy, Americana-isms that pass for way too much “contemporary” folk art.
Most Underrated Folk or Self-taught Artist:
Most Overrated Conspiracy Theory:
Easily the JFK assassination. The puhlic is largely convinced that a massive plot killed the thirty-fifth President. Little wonder, since hundreds of conspiracy books for more than thirty years have postulated dozens of wild theories, including assassins hidden in sewers and behind picket fences, CIA murderers, mystery deaths to key witnesses, the theft of the President’s brain, the alteration of the Zapruder film, and the Manchurian Candidate assignment of Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. The most rabid conspiracy speculation was wrapped into a hellish celluloid vision in Oliver Stone’s 1991 JFK . There’s only one problem standing in the way of the plethora of theories and real history: the facts. The overwhelming evidence is that Lee Harvey Oswald, a twenty-four-year-old sociopath armed with a twelvedollar rifle, was the lone assassin who ended Camelot.
Most Underrated Conspiracy Theory: