January 2011

Overrated

If the speech itself can’t be overrated, its creation myth certainly can. Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address on the back of the flap of an envelope on the train to Gettysburg. Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews, a successful writer of sentimental novels, popularized this tale in The Perfect Tribute . Her version was based on the remembrance of her 14-year-old son, Paul, who heard the story from his history teacher, Walter Burlingame, who remembered hearing this narrative as a boy from his father, Anson Burlingame, who recalled that Edward Everett told him that he saw Lincoln write the Gettysburg Address on a scrap of brown paper on the train to Gettysburg. Andrews’s 47-page book was published in 1906, and it sold more than 500,000 copies and was placed on required reading lists for high school courses in English.

Overrated

Vincent Thomas Lombardi was probably the greatest coach in pro football history. Arriving in Green Bay in 1959, he immediately transformed the Green Bay Packers from the National Football League’s doormat into contenders. From his second season, 1960, through his last as head coach at Green Bay, 1967, his Packers played for the league championship six times and won five, including victories in the first two Super Bowls. Vince Lombardi’s stocky figure on the Green Bay sidelines remains the most recognizable image of pro football’s first golden age, when it established itself as the most popular television sport.

Underrated

Overrated

Until we build the monument to Thomas Paine on the Mall in Washington, D.C., authorized by Congress in 1992 —that is, until we officially admit Paine into the top rank of the Founding Fathers—I will continue to contend that all the usual suspects, yes, all of them are overrated.

Overrated

Overrated

Bing Crosby. The strong paternal voice of Bing Crosby has long soothed America’s soul. His career spanned almost six decades, and the crooners who followed him—Sinatra, Tormé, Bennett—have acknowledged him as one of their influences.

By 1931, when crooning approached its pinnacle of popularity, Crosby found himself in a kind of rivalry with a younger baritone named Russ Columbo. Like the rivalries among hip-hop groups today, the “battle of the baritones” was hyped in the press, though, fortunately, it was not as violent as the tension between factions of Tupac Shakur and Biggy Smalls. Crosby was pretty much the party boy, taking his career only seriously enough to get him from one gig to another. One night at the Cocoanut Grove, Crosby simply didn’t show up, and the bandleader, Gus Arnheim, pulled one of his violinists from the orchestra and put him out front singing. That man was Russ Columbo. Yes, Bing Crosby redefined singing with the advent of the microphone. But it was the competition with Russ Columbo that made him really work for it.

Overrated

American conspiracy theories are hard to underrate, since most of them turn out to be wrong. But their impact is both overrated or underrated, and in this sense, the most overrated are what might be called “event conspiracy theories.” Event theories attribute some dramatic occurrence to the machinations of conspirators. The attack on Pearl Harbor, the crash of TWA Flight 800, and September 11 all have generated such responses, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy unleashed what is perhaps the most sustained outpouring of them.

Events generate conspiracy theories for two quite different reasons: First, sudden, unexpected calamities leave trails of ambiguous evidence. Witnesses give conflicting testimony, records are fragmentary, and accounts may be open to contradictory interpretations. Even when an event happens in front of many witnesses, the reports can contain frustrating inconsistencies. Since absolute truth eludes us in such cases, conspiracists have room to construct alternative narratives.

Overrated

Dr. Seuss. Theodore Seuss Geisel (1904–91), Dr. Seuss, was already an experienced advertising man, political cartoonist, and children’s-book author and illustrator when Houghton Mifflin commissioned him, in 1957, to write a “new reader” primer of 225 vocabulary words for the school market. He came up with The Cat in the Hat , hailed as something new, a “karate chop on the weary little world of Dick, Jane, and Spot,” as the blurb on the back of every hardcover copy still says.

In fact the chop, if such it was, had been delivered long before. From And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937) to Oh, the Places You’ll Go (1990), Dr. Seuss’s 44 books follow the same pattern. He presented, in Mulberry Street , something original and fairly clever (bright silly pictures, easy rhymes) and rendered it, through repetition, both pedestrian and shrill.

Overrated

Overrated

The 1925 Scopes trial is remembered today as a clash of titans, in which Clarence Darrow’s case for progressive, freethinking rationalism triumphed over William Jennings Bryan’s reactionary defense of obscurantism and religious oppression. But that’s the Broadway (and later Hollywood) version, fixed in the dramatic firmament by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee’s Inherit the Wind . The actual Scopes trial decided nothing, established nothing, and changed nothing, and the fabled showdown between Darrow and Bryan basically ended in a draw.

The high school biology teacher John Scopes was not ostracized for the crime of teaching the theory of evolution. Rather, he volunteered to be prosecuted as part of a test case, responding to an announcement by the American Civil Liberties Union. In fact, the authorities in Dayton, Tennessee, were willing to bring the case only after local boosters had persuaded them that the attendant publicity would help revitalize their town.

Overrated

Dick Gregory. As a citizen of the world, an activist for human rights, and a gadfly in the media ointment, Gregory deserves our undying honor and gratitude. But it’s hard to come up with one bit, one joke, even a one-liner associated with Gregory that’s indelibly his, one that never fails to make you laugh.

As a standup comic Gregory broadened the mainstream presence and range for black comedians. But their work soon overshadowed his. By the time that happened, Gregory’s priorities had shifted toward deeper political commitment. He would have been a funny President. But not as funny as the black comics who’ve since walked the trails he helped clear.

Underrated