A President for All Seasons
There is no time like the present for Americans to reflect on the uncommon — and unsung — greatness of Ulysses S. Grant
At the turn of the twentieth century, there was little doubt in the minds of Americans that Ulysses S. Grant would always be numbered among the greatest presidents in our nation’s history.
It was more than a fad — it was a norm:: a mutually held expectation that he should stand shoulder to shoulder with other presidential immortals:: George Washington, the first president; and Abraham Lincoln, Grant’s old boss and demiurge of the Republican Party.
Up until the early 1920s, Grant was beloved of the country first and foremost for accomplishing the rarest of feats for any general:: winning a war — a bitter and bloody civil war — then winning the peace.
As a two-term Republican president, Grant was what would be called these days by hidebound pundits a “lefty,” “liberal” or “lunatic” — or all three — due in large part to his enlightened position on civil rights.
He could take it. He had been called worse by better.
Moved by a ferocious intolerance of injustice, and a deep-seated compassion for the persecuted, Grant fought both as a general and a president for a diverse and inclusive America where we shall “have but little to do to preserve peace, happiness and prosperity at home, and the respect of other nations.”
It should, then, come as no surprise that it was President Grant who established the Department of Justice, which provided the necessary protection for African Americans during the first, promising phases of Reconstruction; and empowered the newly created office of Attorney General to aggressively pursue and prosecute the Ku Klux Klan.
With the help of his friend, Ely Parker, a Seneca attorney who had served with Grant during the Civil War, he developed a visionary policy that was intended to bring a conclusive end to what he saw as an unjust war against Native Americans.
And he took a very public stand on anti-Semitism, appointing “more than fifty Jewish people to federal office, including consuls, district attorneys, and deputy postmasters. He appointed Edward S. Salomon territorial governor of Washington, the first time an American Jewish man occupied a governor’s seat.”
The First Modern President
I contend that, in this sense, Grant was our first twentieth century president — and archetypal social innovator — who fearlessly deviated from the social norms of his day and thereby prefigured the domestic policies of Lyndon Johnson that were the floorings and joists of his Great Society. (It’s easy to see how Grant’s relationship with Frederick Douglass was also a model for LBJ’s strategic alliance with Martin Luther King Jr.)
Three years after winning the Civil War which, by all counts, would have been enough of an achievement for several lifetimes, Grant was elected president of the United States on the Republican ticket with a slogan that was really more of a petition, ripped right out of the prayers of the faithful:: Let Us Have Peace.
It was apposite:: The union was restored but the country was far from united. Grant’s predecessor, Andrew Johnson, was not the least bit interested in fulfilling Lincoln’s promise to “finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds…to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
As if by design, Johnson’s presidency succeeded only in keeping the nation bitterly divided over Lincoln’s vision for Reconstruction, which he opposed and undermined at every turn.
His less-than-ideal behavior — spiteful presidential caprices mixed with violations of his oath of office for which he was impeached — led Americans by daily example to excel only in their mistrust and hatred of other Americans, denying any possibility of the possibility of true reconciliation.
His entire term was a blasphemous inversion of Lincoln’s second inaugural address:: with malice toward all, with charity for none.
That was Johnson’s creed.
A Wish Fulfilled
Grant, mercifully, succeeded him, and with the same dogged determination that he hunted down and destroyed Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, he won the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment:: African American men had the vote.
With the foot of his mud-spattered boot on the scaly throat of that hideous — and hideously persistent — demon Racism, he went in for the kill. The 42nd Congress passed the Enforcement Act of 1871, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act. Grant signed it into law. Now the president had full powers to “declare martial law, impose heavy penalties against terrorist organizations and use military force to suppress the Ku Klux Klan” (emphasis added).
With Grant in command, the Klan’s days, like Lee’s army before it, were numbered.
Throughout his presidency he bravely (read:: logically) argued that former slaves were entitled to “civil rights which citizenship should carry with it,” and tirelessly sought justice for all Native Americans — a humane and thus dramatic reversal of policy for the federal government.
“Wars of extermination . . . are demoralizing and wicked,” Grant told Congress.
It was not only a noble position, it was an unpopular and subversive one on the political spectrum in an era when norms nudged most representatives in the opposite direction.
“At a time when many in the press and public alike called for the extermination of the Indians, he believed every Indian from every tribe should be made a citizen of the United States,” wrote Mary Stockwell in Smithsonian Magazine. “As should the men, women and children just set free from slavery during the Civil War.”
His “Indian Peace Policy” as it was termed by the press, was deemed a failure by the time he left office.
“Since then, Grant has been remembered as a ‘circumstantial’ reformer,” Stockwell observed. “His accomplished friend Ely Parker has been wrongly dismissed as little more than a token.
“Americans would not realize until the twentieth century that the vision of the two friends had been correct.”
The Fallen Idol
The bribery scandals that plagued the Harding administration in the 1920s resurrected unpleasant memories of Grant’s disappointing second term, which was ravaged by the same plague — though Grant appears more a victim of the corruption than an architect of or accessory to it.
The political yoking of painful reminiscences of Grant’s second term with the unpopular Harding was enough to tarnish the his image in the collective consciousness. The efforts of a powerful pro-Confederacy faction that was, at the time, giving credence — and plenty of oxygen — to Civil War revisionists knocked that image right off its plinth of granite.
Spinning whitewashed and cloyingly romanticized narratives, they circulated and popularized tall tales of Robert E. Lee as the gentlemen general:: a benevolent and chivalrous “patriot” fighting for the Lost Cause of states rights with nary a mention of the atrocities of Southern slave society — a society whose defenders were further apotheosized in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind.
Every hero needs a villain. Lost Cause revisionists found theirs in “Sam” Grant, painting him as nothing but a drunken, low-born, Northern butcher.
The fictional glories of the Old South sold — well. And the myths stuck.
A rock-solid foundation for the Jim Crow system of segregation had been constructed; and its builders all but guaranteed one of two potential destinies for the name of Ulysses S. Grant:: ignominy or oblivion.
For a man eulogized by Frederick Douglass as being “too broad for prejudice, too humane to despise the humblest, too great to be small at any point,” this was a tragedy and a mistake.
In time, Grant’s reputation suffered at the hands — and pens — of biased members of the academic establishment. He was frequently ranked as the worst — the very worst — president.
Further, his undisputed military genius that broke the South and restored the Union was much maligned. Myrmidons of the inventors of the Lost Cause fantasies lavished godlike praise on Lee, and directed equal doses of calumny at Grant:: the general to whom Lee capitulated in the home of Wilmer McLean at Appomattox on April 9, 1865.
These combined social forces hit hard Grant’s legacy — as hard as he struck the South as the Commanding General of the United States Army. They certainly snuffed out any flicker of hope that Grant’s likeness would soon be carved out of the side of Mount Rushmore representing one of the two greatest Republican presidents, which sculptor Gutzon Borglum was preparing to do in the Black Hills of Keystone, South Dakota.
The handiwork of the feral Stars and Bars constituency made sure of it. And the realization of the South’s “Mount Rushmore” was that much sweeter:: the Confederate Memorial at Stone Mountain, Georgia, which was being carved at the same time Borglum was beginning his, literally, monumental work in the Black Hills.
“Grant has been forgotten. And I don’t know that it’s ever going to change that dramatically,” said Joan Waugh, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles and the author of U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth in a 2014 Washington Post article.
At the time, her book was one of the positive “reassessments” of the general and president.
She didn’t know it but the tide was turning.
Uncommon Greatness
Grant, the 2017 bestselling biography by Ron Chernow and a History Channel docudrama of the same title produced by Leonardo DiCaprio and Chernow himself — starring Justin Salinger, who lived and breathed the title role with a burning laconic intensity — are driving away those pernicious social forces that held our collective estimation of U.S. Grant in a sort of suspended ambivalence for almost a century.
They’re bringing into sharp relief his remarkable feats as battlefield strategist extraordinaire and a president very much of and for the people — all the people.
We’re not rediscovering Grant — we’re recovering a memory of him that is our birthright:: the memory of an American who lived up to the impossible heroism of Homer’s Odysseus for whom he was named. “A man of wisdom and shrewdness, eloquence, resourcefulness, courage and endurance,” our American Ulysses proved time and again to be the one for the job in times of crisis — any crisis.
This recovering of Grant and his legacy of subverting social norms related to racism, bigotry and prejudice comes at a time when the country again finds itself distressingly polarized over the same issues; when Americans are again mortally divided over the present and future of the nation.
Those of us who aren’t historians, Civil War reenactors, or park rangers are being invited to remember Grant — properly. And not just because we’ve encountered a chance passing of a rarely seen $50 bill with his face engraved upon it; a note that used to be called — what else? — a “Grant,” something one receives only on request from a live bank teller these days.
It’s as if Chernow, DiCaprio and others have used their combined star power to encourage America herself to raise her lost, tired and tearful eyes to the memory of Grant; holding up for all to see the laudable traits — and humanizing defects — of an inspiring and truly heroic leader capable of winning a civil war, even a cold one, and winning the peace.
Their efforts have conjured the spirit of Grant from the tomb in which he is not buried — as Rosa Inocencio Smith reminds us in The Atlantic, he’s entombed in sarcophagi with his wife, Julia.
Free of the taint of vengeful Southern revisionists and the recreant offspring of West Point rivals who begrudged Grant his military success, he is alive and well, standing with us and for us again…
…all of us, particularly those who, because of pride or prejudice, do not share his sense of humanity, for Grant would have surely seen them as the most broken, and therefore in the most need.
In a way, he never abandoned us. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, “the most remarkable work of its kind since the Commentaries of Julius Caesar,” as Edmund Wilson phrased it, echoing Mark Twain’s assessment, was a bestseller in 1885 and has been selling ever since, not once being out of print.
With the number of Grant recovery projects steadily rising since 2014, one can hardly fail to sense his presence when it is needed most.
He was not a myth or a bust of marble:: He was a man, the eldest son of an Ohio tanner, who possessed an uncommon greatness — humble, determined, compassionate and eloquent even when, especially when silent as Grant himself often was.
He fought for and believed in a future for this “nation of great power and intelligence” that was united, just, and inclusive. His life experience tells us that this is not only possible, it is inevitable — if a democracy is really a democracy, and if its people are in it for the long haul.
Such greatness will always — always — be recognized universally in the truth one speaks and the sacrifices one makes.
And in the sincere offering of a hand that is strong and courageous and kind. ::
