January 2011

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The King and I Stagecoach

Overrated

Meriwether Lewis was brilliant. He was an able leader who prepared and launched the expedition. He proved to be a gifted amateur physician, an excellent student of nature who advanced scientific knowledge, an inventive and resourceful field officer, an honest and observant journalist, and a fine navigator, and in addition to all that, he understood what he had seen and achieved and was able to put his discoveries in perspective.

Yet something wasn’t right. There was his moodiness, his occasional harshness toward his men, his underlying distaste for other people, his condescension toward the tribes he met along the way, extreme even by the racist standards of the day. There was also, as Clay Straus Jenkinson described in a piercing monograph, a strange and twisted quality in his relationships with women (who correctly perceived trouble and rebuffed his advances).

Overrated

On the morning of February 23, 1945, while the bloody fighting for Iwo Jima was going on, a small patrol of Marines climbed to the summit of Mount Suribachi and planted an American flag there to show that U.S. forces had taken this crucial part of the island. By 1:00 p.m. it had been replaced by a much larger flag, more visible to Marines battling elsewhere on Iwo Jima.

It was this second flag-raising that the Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal captured and that became the basis for the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia. Rosenthal’s picture won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1945 and has been reproduced more often than any other photograph of World War II.

Overrated

The most overrated American spy is Nathan Hale. He failed miserably in his mission, employing no tradecraft to fool his British targets, and was summarily hanged for his troubles.

Underrated

The faceless but effective American operatives who have successfully foiled efforts by Al Qaeda and others to follow up on September 11, 2001, deserve our hearty appreciation. They are vastly underrated.

Frederick P. Hitz is the author of The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage .

Underrated

Original Coca-Cola. Imagine for a moment that you are hard at work on a fiery hot summer afternoon in the heart of the Deep South. For a pick-me-up, what could be finer than a jolt of pure cane sugar, a grain or two of caffeine, and a wee dram of cocaine, delivered in a glass of icy cold, nicely flavored fizzy water?

I am describing, of course, the original Coca-Cola, as concocted by the pharmacist “Doc” Pemberton in Atlanta. Pemberton’s inspiration, back in 1886, was to combine two of the most popular drugs of the era—caffeine and cocaine—into a soft drink that could be served at the soda fountain.

Overrated

The question of the most overrated American painter is a ticklish one and needs to be defined carefully. If our criterion is prices in the marketplace, I would nominate Childe Hassam. Hassam produced some marvelous paintings but also a great number of duds, and I’m always astonished by how much money the bad paintings fetch when they come up for auction.

Underrated

Overrated

In the years between the World Wars, officer-students at the world’s war colleges, including the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, spent much of their time studying the naval Battle of Jutland (May 31, 1916). After all, the great North Sea fight between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet was then (and remains today) the largest battleship confrontation in history. Sixty battleships and battle cruisers slugged it out in a contest that lasted all day. Consequently, naval officers in the postwar years spent whole weeks and even months pushing little wooden ship models around on a large checkerboard floor in order to comprehend the tactical nuances of this epochal event. But, in fact, the Battle of Jutland was one of the most meaningless and historically unimportant major naval battles of all time.

Overrated

Texas. In the landscape of the Western movie, Texas has it all: sweeping vistas, rugged deserts, high mountains, and tall, stately saguaros. In reality, most of Texas looks like Iowa without the Norwegians. Green and lush farmland is predominant, and it’s mighty flat. As for saguaros, Texas has none (they mostly grow in Arizona and Mexico, with a handful in California). Texas has always sounded like a place that the West should be, and as a matter of fact, it has confused foreigners for years. (See Sergio Leone’s Westerns for proof. In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly you get the impression that the entire history not only of the Civil War but of the entire American West took place in Texas.)

Underrated

Overrated

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). No one ever accused Frank Capra of being subtle, but his best movies have a jaunty optimism that can be irresistible. How could he not be optimistic, this immigrant son of illiterate Sicilian peasants who worked four jobs and slept five hours a night and still won scholarship prizes at the California Institute of Technology? In It Happened One Night (1934) and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), both funny movies, the immigrant boy’s fantasies meshed with those of moviegoers eager to forget the Depression. Even the too heartfelt Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), with James Stewart as a naive senator, has charm that outweighs its long-winded patriotic speeches.

By 1946, however, Americans had come home from World War II with a new attitude, and the Capra corn, which was always close to the surface, had overwhelmed the Capra humor. Also, Capra made the mistake of confusing sentiment with sentimentality.

Overrated

Any and all museums of financial history. The museum at the visitors’ gallery in the New York Stock Exchange has been closed, along with the gallery, since 9/11, but even when it was open, it was a disappointment. The problem with the Stock Exchange museum, along with every other financial history exhibit I have ever seen, is that each one tries to serve as a sort of prospectus—sober, dry, and reassuring. This is understandable, but it leaves out all the good stuff. A first-rate financial museum would trust us dedicated capitalists with the great panics and swindles, the coups and raids, venality and greed —in short, all the things that make both history and finance so much fun. Grand paeans to the market or to various pillars of fiscal rectitude are fine, but without the whiff of a real killing, why are all those people working the floor in the first place?

Underrated