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"U.S.
Grant: American Hero, American Myth" by
Joan Waugh
;
University of North Carolina Press
(384 pages,
$30
)
———
When it
was finally over, when the vote totals had made it
official, he strolled home from a friend's house through
the streets of the little
Illinois
town. His first words to his wife weren't "Woo-hoo!"
or the 19th century equivalent, but something a bit more
somber: "I am afraid I am elected."
And thus
Ulysses S. Grant
prepared, once again, to do his duty. He did it well,
just as he had done when called on to lead Union troops
to victory during the Civil War.
Yet as
Joan Waugh
recounts in her brilliant and unsettling new study of
the life and career of the nation's 18th president,
history has not been kind to Grant. In fact, it's been
downright dastardly. Instead of crediting him with a
generally successful presidency marred by the
selfishness and greed of a few of his appointees, many
scholars — and ordinary citizens too — gradually
allowed the attacks by his enemies to substitute for
truth. The newspapers of Grant's day, some of which were
early versions of the partisan cable channels that
proliferate today, made a sport out of caricaturing
Grant. He was branded as a drunken bum who barely won
the Civil War, and later as a weak president who let his
buddies rob and plunder while he smoked cigars and
admired his fancy cuff links.
Once upon
a time, Waugh notes in "U.S. Grant: American Hero,
American Myth," Grant was right up there with
Lincoln
and
Washington
, a "gigantic figure ... (and) the embodiment of
the American nation in the decades after the Civil
War." In fairly short order, though, everything
changed. And Grant, a brave and able soldier, a man who
hated slavery and loved
the United States
, who fought for the constitutional amendment that
guaranteed African-American men the right to vote,
dropped out of the pantheon of beloved American figures.
"Why
did Grant's star shine so brightly for Americans of his
own day," Waugh muses at the book's outset,
"and why has it been eclipsed so completely for
Americans since at least the mid-twentieth
century?"
Part
biography, part military history, part social chronicle
charting the rise and fall of Grant's reputation,
"U.S. Grant" is a sobering reminder of the
vicissitudes of fame.
"Grant's
legacy disappeared from popular memory with shocking
rapidity," Waugh writes. Even his final resting
place along the
Hudson River
in
New York
— dedicated in 1897, the ornate marble-and-granite
monument is the largest tomb in
North America
— unraveled along with his reputation. By the late
20th century, it was a neglected eyesore, tattooed with
graffiti. It was known mostly through the goofy
Marx Brothers
query: "Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?"
This was,
all told, a peculiar and unfair fate for a man who, in
Waugh's judgment, ought to be celebrated for his
"tangled, complicated, but ultimately inspiring
dimensions."
Grant was
born in
Ohio
, but his adopted hometown of
Galena, Ill.
, is the place with which he is most often linked. Grant
and his wife, Julia, and their four children had moved
to
Galena
just before the Civil War.
From
there, Grant, a
West Point
graduate who had compiled an admirable service record
during his
Army
days, heeded his nation's call once again. After rising
to command the Union forces and winning the war, he
returned to
Galena
. His next stop was the
White House
.
Waugh
takes on the various charges against Grant, one by one:
his alleged drunkenness; his alleged barbarity during
the Civil War; his allegedly corrupt presidential
administration. Grant wasn't perfect, by any means, but
neither was he the whiskey-soaked barbarian, as some
accounts insisted.
Grant's
final days, as throat cancer ate away at him, are
rendered with poignancy and precision by Waugh. He sat
in a chair, clawed by pain, trying to finish his memoirs
in a grim race with death. He wanted to set the record
straight — and did so, for the brief period when the
posthumously published book was a best-seller. Then
other voices drowned him out.
"Wars
produce many stories of fiction," Grant wrote in
his memoirs, "some of which are told until they are
believed to be true."
History,
too, can fall victim to fiction and fashion.
But now
the old soldier has some reinforcements: Waugh's
well-researched and vibrantly written book, which
restores the luster to a lost American hero.
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