Cecil B. DeMille. He was not an artist; rather he was a conductor on a grand scale and therefore does not belong in the pantheon of great film directors. Alfred Hitchcock. Unlike DeMille, he was a true artist, as any careful study of his films will verify. He “camera cut” his movies so skillfully that he left his editors only the simple, noncreative task of assembling his cuts. From the start the film existed in its entirety in Hitchcock’s head.
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January 2011
Sliced bread. A late-1920s product that flourished during the Depression and was said to have created twenty-five thousand new jobs, it was technically sound: Moisture circulation in a sliced, sealed loaf is actually improved. But in the long run it helped put family bakeries out of business and promoted balloon bread. And none of several claimants to the invention appears to have made much money from it. The Brunswick Mineralite bowling ball, introduced in 1914 and made until around 1980. One of the most durable consumer goods ever manufactured, it sold in the millions with a lifetime warranty, yet only a handful were ever returned as defective. By replacing the easily deformed lignum vitae ball, it helped make bowling America’s most popular participant sport.
Most Overrated Highway: Part of I-10. Taking its cues from Robert Moses, in March 1968 the city of New Orleans allowed Interstate 10, which connects Jacksonville to Santa Monica, to rip through the black neighborhood of Claiborne Avenue. Ancient forty-five-foot-tall oak trees were sawed down to make room for a twenty-five-foot-high elevated roadway; the concrete monstrosity forced poor citizens to abandon their businesses and homes. The neighborhood had once been home to Storyville, the historic birthplace of jazz. Most Underrated Highway:
I would like to be supportive of trees, as I think most of us would, but I can’t recall ever knowing it was Arbor Day on Arbor Day. People have heard of Arbor Day, but only in the general way that they have heard of Nebraska and Utah, which, according to my 1998 At-a-Glance Standard Diary and Daily Reminder , are the only two states that recognize Arbor Day officially. And are there any trees in Nebraska or Utah? In my day every state celebrated Arbor Day. I think. You could say that the most underrated official national holiday is Election Day, our annual occasion for majority rule, which only a minority observe. But that is because a majority has determined Election Day to be overrated. From my point of view, Father’s Day would be more festive if people gave money.
Most Overrated Generation or Era: 1930s café society. It’s tempting to point to the sixties counterculture, whose somewhat smug rejection of the inauthenticity of mass society fueled instead a new kind of ironic, hip consumerism: the straight road from the Volkswagen to the “Dodge rebellion” to what a recent writer in the L.A. Times describes as the “random acts of coolness” in current ads from Levi’s and Nike. But the counterculture has taken enough hits, and it’s hard to argue that a generation that many seem to feel is responsible for eroding the foundations of Western civilization is in any sense “overrated.”
Most Overrated General: Sometimes when I read military history, I get the feeling I’m reading about an Olympic competition in which points are awarded for style as much as for results. In the general-judging business, matters of style and performance are too often entangled. George McClellan was very stylish. He built such a beautiful army he didn’t want to use it. He believed he could choose the kind of war he wanted to fight—an antiseptic war of grand strategies—and ignore the ugly parts. He wandered about his battlefields afterward, and the sight sickened him. The Northern public lionized him, and his soldiers loved him because being beautiful was much more satisfying than being shot down in windrows. The Civil War killed his style.
Most Overrated Founding Father: Thomas Jefferson. Not because his life was unworthy of honor but because the myth surrounding him puts his person and contributions out of human scale.
It has been a little under a decade since the editors here pestered a group of historians and journalists with these questions: “1.) In all of American history, whom do you consider the single most overrated public figure? 2.) Most underrated?” The response was generous and so interesting that we never quite got over it.
Neither did our readers. Again and again, even after years had passed, someone would tell us how he or she remembered, with either fondness or irritation, a passage from that particular issue. Eventually, we found ourselves discussing how to strike the same chord once more. Clearly we couldn’t do it ourselves—that is, we editors make up a list of various American things and declare them either overrated or underrated. At the very best the result of such an exercise would seem arrogant and contentious; at worst, arrogant and contentious and dull. No, we had to go back out to the world with our query, and it couldn’t be the identical query. Yet we could discover no sensible follow-up. Even asking something so broad as what American thing is most overrated or underrated would have sounded weird.
Most Overrated Financier: Bernard Baruch. This is not to say he was a poor politician or statesman. Baruch performed yeoman service during World War I, when he headed the War Industries Board, and he served well under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. As financier, however, he has at best a spotty record. But still, he was a genius at self-promotion; unlike most of the plungers of his time, he yearned for the public spotlight, and he certainly had it. For instance, he created the fable that he sold his holdings just before the 1929 Crash and got back so into the market at the bottom in 1929. In fact he lost heavily in the Crash and was not in stocks in 1932. Most Underrated Financier:
Most Overrated Espionage Novel: My candidate is Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity , his first, in 1980. The annotated bibliography of spy novels, Cloak and Dagger Fiction , begins its outline, “Suffering from amnesia, a shooting victim finds a Swiss bank account which identifies him as a professional assassin. . . .” Ludlum’s success led to a torrent of cabal fiction, most of it even less credible than The Bourne Identity , with similarly hyperventilated prose and plot lines by Jackson Pollock. Most Underrated Espionage Novel: