Most Overrated Politician: President Jefferson Davis of the Confederate States of America. Stubborn, inflexible, overrating his own limited military knowledge, a poor judge of character, a man of prejudices and overwhelming pride, he was—as can be seen in retrospect—a terrible choice for the leadership of a cause that desperately needed vision and political skill rather than personal and regional arrogance. Most Underrated Politician: Richard Nixon, whose involvement in the Watergate offenses and whose unpleasant personal characteristics and attitudes cause many to overlook the many accomplishments of his first administration: SALT I, the volunteer army, the EPA and other environmental landmarks, affirmative action (the Philadelphia Plan), the 1970 gains in school desegregation, the first wage and price controls in peacetime, federal revenue-sharing with states and localities, and—though defeated by Democratic Congresses—the most far-reaching welfare-reform proposal in history, as well as an early health-care proposal.
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January 2011
Most Overrated Poet: Many overrated poets are no longer overrated. The same goes for the sadly neglected and ignored. History is a wonderful corrective. In her niche in eternity Emily Dickinson, who did not have a reputation in her lifetime, might manage a tight smile at knowing that she reigns as the queen of American poets. Elizabeth Bishop’s achievement was long overshadowed by that of her more flamboyant contemporaries. In the early 1970s everyone seemed to agree that Bishop was the most underrated American poet. As a result, readers rediscovered her, and she is now probably the most beloved poet of the second half of the century.
Most Overrated National Turning Point: The rejection of the Treaty of Versailles. Many have argued that if the United States had joined the League of Nations, the Second World War might never have taken place and the history of the twentieth century would have followed a different course. I very much doubt that ratification of the Versailles Treaty would have overcome the historic isolationism of the American people and produced U.S. military interventions to defend the idea of world order. Even today, after a second world war, Americans are negative about sending troops abroad to kill and die in the absence of a direct threat to U.S. vital interests. Most Underrated National Turning Point: The wartime enactment of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known as the GI Bill of Rights. This law and subsequent similar legislation for later wars opened the gates of opportunity to millions of veterans and contributed enormously to the release of economic and intellectual energy that carried postwar America to the summit of the world.
Most Overrated National Park:
Out here in the Rocky Mountains we have just celebrated with appropriate pomp and oratory the 125th birthday of Yellowstone, the first national park, so the question you pose is timely, though not particularly easy to address. There may be an overrated national park somewhere in our country, but I don’t know where it is.
Most Underrated National Park:
As for an underrated national park . . . well, in the present circumstances, you could say (and I do) that all national parks are underrated. Not by the people; the American people always have loved their parks—banal but true—and they prove their affection year after year in the most direct manner possible: by visiting them in staggering numbers (in 1996 an estimated 265 million people). The parks, as James Bryce, former British ambassador to the United States, once said, may be the best idea America ever had, and most Americans know that.
Most Overrated Mystery Writer: James Michener famously said that a writer can make a fortune in America but can’t make a living. It strikes me that it’s the same story with all success, d’estime as well as d’argent . Nobody gets the right amount of recognition. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the putative founding fathers of hard-boiled fiction, have reached that pinnacle of literary sueccess where they are routinely praised by people who have not actually read their work. I’m far too fond of their books to call them overrated, but how can any book live up to all that shouting?
Most Overrated Movie Star: Paul Muni. Because Jack Warner confused overacting with great acting, he decreed that whenever Muni’s name appeared on a movie poster or advertisement, it must be preceded by the honorific Mr. Warner was not alone in regarding Muni as the greatest actor in films. Muni himself shared that opinion, and by the end of the 1930s he wielded enough power to get his brother (a public school teacher in the Bronx) imported to Hollywood to rework John Huston’s script for Juarez . The Motion Picture Academy was equally impressed with Muni, nominating him for a best-actor award on numerous occasions and finally handing him an Oscar for his performance in The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936). In fairness to Muni, it must be said he was very good at imitating foreign accents and regional speech patterns, but he never let you forget that he was acting and that acting was a very difficult thing to do. Most Underrated Movie Star:
Most Overrated Musician: Elvis Presley. If we put aside the posthumous madness, Elvis had a pretty tenor voice and a distinctive way with ballads, but his rhythmic sense was often clumsily ersatz, and even within the idiom that declared him king, he is less inventive, daring, and satisfying than Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others. (Runner-up: Barbra Streisand.) Most Underrated Musician: Louis Armstrong. This may seem perverse, given the magnitude of his fame, but not so perverse as the inclination among academics to discuss American music solely in terms of text-driven composers, while failing to recognize Armstrong’s vision as the dominant force in defining a new world music that puts a premium on improvisation, blues tonality, and rhythm. Armstrong’s power and universality brought American music to a plateau our symphonists could only hypothesize. (Runner-up: Ethel Waters.)
JFK, who, to use Garry Wills’s term, imprisons us still in post-Camelot smog.
Teddy, for getting away with it all. No mean feat, even for a K.