American Monsters: 44 Rats, Blackhats, and Plutocrats. Edited by Jack Newfield and Mark Jacobson, Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 2004. Partial list of contributors: Nat Hentoff, Christopher Hitchens, Todd Gitlin, Steve Earle, Lucius Sheperd.

When you really need to take political temperatures – gauging the heat produced by indignation, rage, disappointment, shock and awe – you’re always better off sticking a licked finger up into liberal winds than into their Marxist counterparts. Dialectical materialists (unmoved by the romantic nostalgia inspired by the ersatz-Americana of Lady Liberty, hot dogs and pastoral fly balls) tend to register a fairly regular level of outrage regardless of who is in the White House, and transgressions tend to come not as surprises, but as reinforcements of an understanding that already holds American society to be a despicable, oligarchical project unworthy of being saved.

Liberals, on the other hand – those who truly believe that the New Deal and the Great Society enshrined the core values of American democratic capitalism and that slavery, Jim Crow and Vietnam are aberrations; who introduce their books with lines like “America is the greatest country on earth. We invented jazz and rock and roll, built the Brooklyn Bridge […] we are the light of the world. But we are not perfect” (page XI) – are wont to stomp their feet at the slightest sign of extremism like farmyard animals before a storm. When a pirate like George W. Bush sweeps into the presidential office that, at heart, these liberals venerate, they can become apoplectically obsessed with rooting out monstrosities.

Such is the kind of project that is American Monsters: 44 Rats, Blackhats, and Plutocrats and, understood as such, it is a fun, conversation-starting book. Editors Jack Newfield and Mark Jacobson have assembled an impressive roster of contributors to write short, diverse essays ranging from turgid to hilarious skewering “forty-four of the worst citizens America has ever produced.”

Divided up into categories such as “Low Creatures in High Office,” “Confederates,” “Unholy Holymen,” “Plutocrats and Despoilers,” and “Culture Criminals” and “The Ninth Circle – The Worst of the Worst,” American Monsters goes after the big ones (Henry Kissinger, George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Strom Thurmond, James H. Peabody and Henry Ford), as well as targeting less obvious abominations such as Webster Thayer (the judge who condemned Sacco and Vanzetti to death), Ty Cobb (the notoriously racist baseball legend) and fascist-sympathizer (and Wasteland editor) Ezra Pound.

American Monsters is a collection replete with real treasures. Rocker Steve Earle goes after the unjustly-lionized murderer of countless Native Americans, President Andrew Jackson, provocatively asking the reader to imagine a German Jew paying for movie tickets with bank notes festooned with Hitler’s portrait:

Far-fetched? Maybe in Germany, but not in America. Not if you’re a descendant of one of the once proud Native American nations of what is now the Southeastern United States: the Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole and Cherokee. And not when you consider that the face on the United States twenty dollar bill is that of none other than Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, the seventh president of the United States. (page 3)

Legs Mcneill offers a fascinating and (for once) multi-dimensional exploration of the Charlie Manson phenomenon, examining the ways in which the nauseating misogyny represented by Manson and his fawning squad of sex-slaves was actively enjoyed by the likes of the Beach Boys up until the Tate/LaBianca murders took Manson out of the in crowd. James Marshall’s exposition of the life of Morris Levy – the one-time United Jewish Appeal ‘Man of the Year’ who, when not raising funds for Israel, was using his brutal mob connections with the Genovese family to back up the muscle he employed to rob artists of their royalties – is a chilling and heat-rending story. Anyone who has sung along with the tune “Why do Fools fall in Love?” will no doubt be crestfallen to learn the specific ways in which the young black/Puerto Rican group who wrote the gem was robbed.

Nevertheless, American Monsters is also ridden with inexcusable aesthetic and political flaws. When Joe Conason goes after steel magnates Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick by saying that they “represented opposing strands of the capitalist ethos that when twisted together made a strong combination, like a steel cable” (page 167), even the pure evil of his targets is not enough to stop one from wishing that the book also had a section devoted to “Crimes Against the Metaphor” reserved specifically for Conason himself. The “Pet Peeves” section towards the end of American Monsters makes an unsubstantiated, unfair and distasteful attack on the admittedly borderline Rev. Al Sharpton. And even though American liberalism has for decades drawn on the grossest history of crass anti-Communism, this writer was still surprised to find an egregious assault on the life’s work of John Reed. As part of his raving anti-Red screed, essayist Will Blythe opines “Here is a not unfamiliar example of the journalist as power-tropic, his sympathies leaning toward the strongman who grants him access, who breaks bread – or, is it eggs? – with him.” (page 335) To write those words in an anthology to which Christopher Hitchens has contributed? Now that’s ballsy.

Actually, it’s an anthology that’s too ballsy by half; American Monsters is a book about men, written almost exclusively by men. The accordingly restricted view of American history thus offered up is unfortunate.

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