Director of American Studies Program and professor of history, University of Texas, Austin Most overrated: Woodrow Wilson. He was a provincial who appeared cosmopolitan, an academic who could not tolerate the free play of ideas or the minds of any women, and a world leader whose obsessions befouled human discourse and contributed materially to the chaos of the succeeding decades. Most underrated:
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University Professor, George Washington University Whoever happens to have just been inaugurated as President. Whoever has just ceased to be President.
Professor emeritus, University of North Carolina, Greensboro Harry S. Truman. He needlessly stimulated the Red Scare with his “loyalty” program, intensified the Cold War with his apocalyptic presentation of the Truman Doctrine, and promoted the Imperial Presidency with his assertions of unlimited presidential power. Ulysses S. Grant—not as a general but as a President. By backing Radical Reconstruction as best he could, he made a greater effort to secure the constitutional rights of blacks than did any other President between Lincoln and Lyndon B. Johnson.
American Heritage recently asked historians—including all members of the Society of American Historians—as well as journalists, politicians, and a few others to answer this two-part question:
- 1. In all of American history, whom do you consider the single most overrated public figure?
- 2. Most underrated?
Strangely enough, many journalists and public figures seemed reluctant to make such judgments. The Washington Post ’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee, responded, “I can get into trouble quite well by myself—I don’t need help from you, pal.” Howard Baker, the White House Chief of Staff, wrote: “I ain’t making no enemies living or dead.” But historians accepted the challenge with relish—and their answers constitute the bulk of what follows.
James B. Duke Professor of History Emeritus, Duke University Theodore Roosevelt, whose behavior was too often based upon ego rather than thought and principle. Gen. George Marshall, who abandoned the opportunity to win glory in World War II as the commander in chief in the European theater to give more important service as the chief of staff, who was a splendid Secretary of State and the principal architect of the brilliant Marshall Plan.
Contributing Editor, American Heritage Woodrow Wilson in a walk. Never has the peril of having a truly good man in the White House been more clearly demonstrated. His dictation of peace terms at Versailles was one of the seminal blunders of this century, and his overweening vanity and his sense of self-righteousness did as much to sabotage the League of Nations as anything Henry Cabot Lodge thought of. Winfield Scott was a political fool. Nevertheless he was our greatest soldier between Washington and Sherman. He created the professional American army and led it brilliantly for half a century. Scott deserved a better war, or, failing that, better understanding of the wars he did fight in.
Former president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters; retired dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Most overrated: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. I have in mind his conventional status as a thinker and stylist. My impression from reading The Common Most underrated:
Law and other writings is that he wrote rather undistinguished legal prose, studded with occasional happy turns of phrase. As for his “philosophy,” it was a very ordinary skepticism based on the usual science-inspired materialism.
By interpreting the past, historians try to help us determine what and who was good for us or bad for us. The optimists among them have seen steady progress for mankind, an accumulation of knowledge and wisdom that leads to technological improvement and social betterment. The pessimists, of course, see a falling off—what was once a golden age in the arts and government has come apart at the seams, ending in a general degradation of everything we hold dear. The optimists agree with Robert Browning that the best is yet to be. The pessimists prefer Bertolt Brecht, who said, “An optimist is someone who hasn’t heard the news.”
Biographer; author of Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker Most overrated: Theodore Roosevelt. He was an outsized, charismatic personality who set America’s course for the twentieth century, but he is hailed as a champion in several areas where he in fact made mischief. Roosevelt was a “trustbuster” who was selective in his targets and who reined in “muckraking” investigative journalists who attacked oil and railroad cartels. He was a “conservationist” who himself slaughtered buffalo and caribou, and a heroic “Rough Rider” who could have been more effective, if less celebrated, had he retained his post as Undersecretary of the Navy and arranged for proper transport and supplies for troops engaged in the Spanish-American War, which he so eagerly sought. Most underrated: