Molthrop entertains JCC crowd with Lafitte lecture
By ALAN SMASON, SPECIAL TO THE CCJN
With his clean cut hair that suggestively droops over his right forehead, Morgan Molthrop looks more like an All-American football player than an author. The dashing figure in a dark blue blazer and a red power tie, bears more than a passing resemblance to TV’s Michael Weatherly as he moves across a canvas backdrop of two colorful maps he has painted of early New Orleans as well as pirate den Grande Terre.
Morgan Molthrop reveals Lafitte’s Pirate Rules. (Photo by Alan Smason)
Holding onto his wireless microphone, he stops in front of a list he has painted of “Lafitte’s Code,” which he uses to explain the mindset and business acumen of the Jewish privateer Jean Lafitte.
“I’m not a historian, but I’m the guy who reads all the footnotes,” he admitted to the room filled to capacity to hear him talk about Jean Lafitte, a man Molthrop laughingly refers to as being in the “import/export business.”
Molthrop gave away copies of his previous work “Andrew Jackson’s Playbook: 15 Strategies fo Success” that was published two years ago in time for the bicentennial of the Battle of New Orleans. He sold copies of his new book on Lafitte, but also made a pitch for his newest work, a study of Alexander the Greek, whom he used as a launching off point for his examination of Lafitte.
“In the search for Alexander it is wrong to suggest that the man must be disentangled from the myth,” Molthrop maintained, “for the myth is sometimes of his own making and then it’s the most direct clue to the mind.”
He countered that “the myth is important. People get so tied up in trying to prove one point or another that they forget that history is story,” he continued. “When you forget the story and you bore a bunch of people, then you don’t do your job.”
Dashing about the room to make point after point, Molthrop was never out of breath, but occasionally ran out of words, trying to convey the essence of the legendary buccaneer, who raided Spanish cargo ships on a regular basis at first for France and later for Columbia. Molthrop considered him “a legendary figure.”
Foremost was his control of munitions and gunpowder, according to Molthrop. “This is a man with his ammunition who supplied the Battle of New Orleans, both sides. It was the seminal battle in all American history.”
Here are photos from his talk.
