Narrative historian; author, most recently, of The Miracle of Dunkirk Most overrated: Patrick Henry. His “liberty or death” speech has put him on a pedestal with the other Founding Fathers, but how much did he really do? He contributed practically nothing to the military side of the American Revolution, and he contributed only mischief to the adoption of the Constitution. He was steadily opposed to it all the way. He was the first of many American politicians to get away with a gift of gab. Most underrated:
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Professor of history, Chestnut Hill College; author of Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century Woodrow Wilson. A man of superficial ideas but no real principles, an academic politician ignorant of the world; the proponent of an abstract internationalism that was adopted by Republicans as well as Democrats—in sum, the founding father of our globalist predicaments. Grover Cleveland. A man of considerable decency and honesty who had to struggle to balance the destinies of his nation against the increasingly shrill advocacies of his Republican opponents and against the rising ignorant portion of his own party; a conservative liberal in the best sense of these two now widely abused and nearly meaningless terms.
Professor and director of the history faculty, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Most overrated: Thomas Jefferson. The limits of his human sympathies and the ways in which his fiery temperament and rigidity interfered with greatness are insufficiently acknowledged by a historical profession awash in Jeffersonian nostalgia. Madison—a far greater political and constitutional intellect—understood that his friend Thomas Jefferson was something of a loaded pistol, and Madison’s sense is confirmed by close readings of the Kentucky Resolutions (Jefferson’s work) and Madison’s Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and Report of 1799. Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence took on its much-admired spare elegance only after Congress had edited it heavily. He was a disastrous revolutionary governor of Virginia, and, as he had the grace to acknowledge, his Presidency was just as bad. He expressed our highest ideals as a people but incarnated as eloquently the difficulties of achieving them. Most underrated:
Novelist; author of Chesapeake and Texas , among many others
Most overrated:
Gen. George Armstrong Custer, a flamboyant, exhibitionistic, loose-cannon poseur who enjoyed few successes and many failures, including a great disaster in which his loyal troops paid the supreme penalty for his braggadocio. In my various studies I have crossed his track many times and in many different situations and always with amazement that he should have been able to get away with what he did. But I am also amused that the one-track diligence of his widow should have converted him into a national hero of the most dubious credentials.
Most underrated:
Christopher Columbus. He was a good sailor but had a completely mistaken view of the size of the earth. Until the day he died he thought he had reached the East Indies. Why should we revere a man who made a stupid miscalculation and never recognized his error? Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Born in 1815, she developed a radical vision of women’s place in American society that has not yet been fully realized. She should be celebrated as one of the most original and innovative theorists America has ever produced.
Author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Charles Lindbergh. If he’d been less of a hunk—a small, sallow Greek, shall we say—would his ability to prop himself up on a joystick have been quite so celebrated? Gerald Ford. Unelected, laughed at, shot at, and unfairly denied the full term he deserved for ending the “national nightmare” of 1969-1974.
Executive Secretary, Organization of American Historians; Professor of History, Indiana University John F. Kennedy. Practically any woman of any significance, but especially Eleanor Roosevelt.
J. G. Randall Distinguished Professor of History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Most overrated: If I have learned anything from the study of American history, it is to be wary of identifying any public figure as the “single most” anything. I would like to bend the rules a bit by suggesting certain specific instances in which public figures appear to be either overrated or underrated. As for an overrated public figure, I am ambivalent—perhaps John Quincy Adams as President and congressman, when he seemed to be woefully unaware of political realities, disdainful of the popular will, and contemptuous of the rules and procedures of the national legislature; or perhaps William Lloyd Garrison, whose uncompromising extremism and overbearing and presumptuous manner not only put off some who might otherwise have joined the attack on slavery but also blunted the thrust of the movement by fomenting splits among its supporters. Most underrated:
May Brodbeck Professor in the Liberal Arts, University of Iowa Most underrated: Eleanor Roosevelt, although a new wave of scholarship about her and her colleagues is under way to correct this situation. Most historians have treated her, when at all, as a humanizer of her husband’s hard-edged politics, and the popular interpretation of her career is still that of the ugly duckling turned into an ugly swan by her husband’s illness and the tutelage of Louis Howe.
Most overrated: Ronald Reagan. I know that one can be accused of being present-minded and lacking perspective, but I still think President Reagan is the most overrated of our public figures past and present. I base this on his record in California, where as governor he constantly opposed what the legislature had concluded was necessary in the way of taxes, social services, and schools. In short, he did not understand the society in which he was living. Professional PR firms glossed this over, and so he went on to national office, appealing to fear, prejudice, and nostalgia. Most underrated: