GRANT AND THE HISTORIANS

...Schlesinger’s appreciations of Roosevelt and various New Dealers are shrewd and penetrating, and Goldman’s narrative of intellectual history is highly persuasive...

...In the process, Grant showed considerable political skill...

...He wrote his Memoirs in the same way, even though wracked with pain from the cancer that was killing him...

...His Alabama treaty with Great Britain submitted a festering Civil War dispute to international arbitration, anticipating Theodore Roosevelt in seeking useful forms of international law to settle disputes...

...During Andrew Johnson’s presidency, the Ku Klux Klan had been formed and white southerners had begun to use violence to deny blacks the rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment...

...The earliest assertions of this progressive thesis—in, for example, THE HISTORIANS OF THE NEW DEAL WROTE PARTISAN HISTORY, AND THEY WROTE IT WELL...

...It was understandable that southern traditionalists should attack Grant, but it seems odd that he received almost no credit from progressive historians...

...For such progressive historians and their students, Grant’s presidency makes no sense...

...In response, Grant pushed through the Fifteenth Amendment, giving the federal government power to enforce voting rights, and deployed the Army to quell violence and guarantee fair elections...

...But then the New Dealers were not, in fact, much concerned with full rights for blacks...

...The progressives have dominated the writing of American political history for most of this century...

...His administration was “the all-time low point in statesmanship in our nation’s history,” declares the usually perceptive C. Vann Woodward...

...But a more typical New Deal figure was Claude Bowers...

...This bloc of the West and South remained the base of the Democratic party from 1896 to 1956, except in 1904 (when Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt carried the West) and 1928 (when the Catholic Democrat Al Smith lost the West and most of the South...

...Like the Whig historians, the historians of the New Deal wrote partisan history, and they wrote it well...

...They wanted to see in the self-interested complaints of overextended farmers and the softmoney nostrums of various crackpots the forerunners of the redistribution policies of the New Deal...

...This is, for example, the theme of V. O. Key’s 1949 Southern Politics...

...But he also wrote a book on the horrors of Reconstruction and its oppression of whites...

...But he ranks well above, for example, Kennedy and Johnson, presidents whom many historians—and the journalists they have trained—still seem to regard as among the best and brightest...

...But, Scaturro argues, his policies foretold later expansionism and internationalism...

...In 1869, the Civil War was over, but the inflation created by undisciplined printing of greenbacks was raging, and Congress and the executive branch were in bitter deadlock over the reconstruction of the South...

...The Populists’ first great cause was the free coinage of silver, so that farmers could pay off their debts to bankers in cheap money...

...My family is buried beyond political recovery for years...

...Grant’s isolated America did not face grave foreign-policy challenges...

...argued that Grant’s involvements in scandal were much less than generally thought...

...This is the history that has been absorbed by most of today’s reporters—which is why the press came naturally to treat Ronald Reagan’s 1980s as an age of greed like the 1920s and to assume that it would be followed by another economic disaster and another liberal administration building an even larger government...

...These historians depicted the Depression of the 1930s as the logical result of the selfishness and frivolousness of the Republicans’ 1920s...

...Like Macaulay and the Whig historians of Britain during the nineteenth century, they see political history as a struggle between great forces—in this case the struggle between rich and poor, the classes and the masses...

...Others had more self-interested motives...

...His policy eventually foundered when it became apparent that northern voters—weary of war and resenting the use of the military to help Negroes—preferred the apparent order of southern white rule to the apparent disorder of enforcing the Constitution...

...His administration, we are told again and again, had a level of corruption never surpassed in American history...

...He did not favor the debtor West and South against the creditor East...

...It’s true that some did lament the opposition of white southerners to granting even minimal rights to blacks, and some hoped vainly for an alliance between poor whites and blacks...

...It was this feeling, more than a response to economic events, that produced Democratic majorities in Congress after the elections of 1874...

...Their major books, published mostly in the 1950s and early 1960s, were beautifully written and sold well...

...The one genuine scandal, Scaturro argues, was the bribing of war secretary William Belknap, and Grant fired him...

...The later withdrawal of federal troops and the move in ensuing years toward southern segregation were probably inevitable: Segregation was accepted by Grant’s Republican successor Rutherford B. Hayes after he won the decisive electoral votes in the disputed 1876 election, and it certainly would have been the policy of the popular-vote winner, Democrat Samuel Tilden...

...Charges that Grant defended administration officials who broke the law turn out to be unfounded...

...The legend of extraordinary corruption during Grant’s presidency derives primarily from the complaints of those who loathed him at the time...

...Thus, when progressive historians examined the early nineteenth century, they saw only Jefferson’s yeoman southern farmers fighting the entrenched Federalists of New England and Jackson’s western frontiersmen battling the epicene Nicholas Biddle in Philadelphia...

...He did not expand government to help the common man...

...Conservatives especially have a stake in the reassessment of President Grant...

...Last year the prolific Geoffrey Perret published a biography which looked at Grant’s presidency afresh and rendered a not altogether negative judgment...

...Even when Franklin Roosevelt added Catholics and union members to the Democratic base, he carried the big industrial states of the North and East only narrowly, sometimes losing them (Pennsylvania in 1932, Michigan in 1940, Ohio in 1944), and winning by much bigger percentages in the South and West...

...And he did it knowingly and deliberately, overcoming severe political obstacles...

...In the hands of the progressive historians, this view of American history was married to an effort to justify— as historically inevitable and morally right—the regional basis of the Democratic party...

...He was the enemy, and treated as such...

...And it is a story of increasing economic redistribution achieved through increasing governmental intervention—a tale of progress, occasionally interrupted, but ultimately triumphant and beneficent...

...He was a Coolidge or an Eisenhower, not a Woodrow Wilson or an Adlai Stevenson...

...The great achievement of Scaturro’s President Grant Reconsidered is to show that Grant had important purposes as president, that he made serious attempts to achieve them, and that he achieved considerable success...

...Of Grant’s tenure, Richard Hofstadter writes, “not much need be said...

...I am becoming more and more isolated...

...Scaturro begins by disposing of the charges of corruption...

...The struggle is not just between individual debtors and creditors but debtor and creditor states and regions...

...For this he was attacked both by white southerners, who characterized Reconstruction as oppression, and by liberal Republicans, who attacked the alleged corruption of Republican politicians in the South...

...The challenge Grant faced when he came to office was not economic redistribution...

...These were not purposes that commend themselves to the progressive- New Deal tradition...

...In 1869, Grant’s first year in office, Henry Adams wrote a friend, “My hopes of the new administration have all been disappointed...

...It impressed no less a reader than Bill Clinton, who, before a recent taping, told Newshour host Jim Lehrer that Grant has gotten a “bum rap” and (perhaps self-servingly) Michael Barone is senior staff editor of Reader’s Digest and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics...

...Restoring economic stability was Grant’s first priority...

...Grant certainly used the spoils system, but so had every administration since Jackson’s, and none more than Lincoln’s...

...He was simply a standpatter, passive and inert—just as his enemies said in his own time...

...The common verdict on Grant is that he was “an ignorant and confused president,” as historian Thomas A. Bailey puts it...

...My friends have almost all lost ground instead of gaining it as I hoped...

...After his Santo Domingo defeat, he ensured the success of the Alabama treaty by having Sumner stripped of his chairmanship— an assertion of executive power that would have been applauded by most New Deal historians if Roosevelt had done it...

...This consensus, however, is being challenged by writers outside the professional historians’ guild...

...But Grant’s unsustained Reconstruction policy was the only serious attempt between the presidencies of Lincoln and Truman to try to use federal power to guarantee the rights of black Americans...

...But he is inevitably named, by conservatives as well as liberals, as one of the worst presidents in American history...

...Over and over again historians have quoted the venomous comment of Grant’s contemporary, Henry Adams: “The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin...

...The picturesque Whiskey Ring was formed during Johnson’s administration and uncovered during Grant’s...

...When the progressive historians came to deal with the New Deal, they took their cue from Roosevelt—who had placed himself in history as the successor of Jefferson and Jackson (and shrewdly annexed his cousin Theodore and Lincoln from the Republicans...

...Moreover, Grant refused to talk in a way that charmed them...

...The famous Cr?dit Mobilier scandal, involving Grant’s vice president, Schuyler Colfax, concerned a bribery committed before Grant was president...

...Bowers’s progressive credentials were never in doubt: As Roosevelt’s ambassador to Spain he unsuccessfully urged the sale of arms to the leftist government in the Spanish Civil War...

...He reduced the federal deficit, vetoed the inflation bill of 1874, and pushed through a Resumption Act to withdraw greenbacks from circulation and resume specie payments...

...But Grant’s silences, Scaturro argues, are not evidence of stupidity...

...But all such progressive historians put a premium on presidents who enlarge government, and by that measure, Grant inevitably comes out at the very bottom...

...And even Grant’s defeats showed his devotion to blacks: He seems to have imagined that Santo Domingo could be admitted into the United States as three or four black-majority states, each a source of black political power in the Congress and a haven for blacks oppressed in the American South...

...GRANT AND THE HISTORIANS A Better President Than They Think By Michael Barone Ulysses S. Grant is universally ranked among the greatest American generals, and his Memoirs are widely considered to belong with the best military autobiographies ever written...

...For modern southern historians, the reason has been simple: The victorious Yankee general Grant was the one president who tried seriously to enforce blacks’ rights during Reconstruction...

...And Bryan was the first candidate to reveal the modern divisions of regional party voting, carrying most of the states west of the Missouri and south of the Ohio and the Potomac...

...By this measure, Grant does not rank as high as Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Coolidge, and Eisenhower...

...The major issue of political history is understood to be economic redistribution: The state is needed to redress the imbalance of income and must become ever more active to fight what Franklin Roosevelt called the “malefactors of great wealth...

...Some of these complainers were southerners who hated his Reconstruction policy...

...And in the 1950s and early ’60s, Democrats like Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy urged delay on civil rights, lest the South break away from the Democratic party...

...In Eric Goldman’s Rendezvous with Destiny, the New Deal is depicted as the final triumph of progressive ideas over the resistance of the 1920s-style past...

...For modern progressive historians, however, the answer has been more complex...

...Over the years, groups of historians have been assembled by Schlesinger and others to create wellpublicized rankings of American presidents...

...His contemporaries who looked for style missed the substance of Grant, and almost all historians since have been happy to repeat their verdict...

...It makes more sense to put a premium on maintaining the stable possibility for individuals in a civil society to improve their lives and the lives of others...

...The first volume of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s still unfinished Age of Roosevelt, for example, is about the 1920s, during which Roosevelt himself played only a small part in politics...

...For them it was more important to keep together the base of the progressive Democratic party in the West and South...

...Frank Scaturro’s work in President Grant Reconsidered should prompt a reassessment of the entire progressive- New Deal tradition—the coalition of politicians and historians using American history to justify both the regional basis of the Democratic party and the policies of an expanding federal bureaucracy dedicated to economic redistribution...

...The fabled attempt by Jay Gould and Jim Fisk to corner the gold market was foiled when Grant ordered Boutwell to sell gold...

...Beneath the silence a strong mind was at work...

...The federal government, thanks in large part to Grant, had won a great war...

...In his new President Grant Reconsidered, Scaturro makes a convincing case that Grant was a strong and, in many important respects, successful president...

...His attempt to annex Santo Domingo was scuttled by Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Charles Sumner, but it presaged America’s expansion in the Caribbean in the 1890s—as did Grant’s first moves toward building a canal in Panama...

...A proper appreciation of Grant is an excellent step toward breaking the progressives’ stranglehold on the study of American history—and developing in students a better appreciation of the benefits our history has brought us...

...Now comes Frank Scaturro, amateur historian, New York lawyer, and president of the association that refurbished Grant’s Tomb for its centennial last year...

...Even the conservative Paul Johnson calls him “a boob...

...For all such figures—the progressive politicians and progressive historians alike—Grant’s Reconstruction policy was almost as unpalatable as his push for hard money...

...For progressive historians, of course, Grant’s policy of hard money was exactly wrong...

...But it was still failing to meet its basic duties to provide a stable currency and equally enforce the law...

...The second major challenge Grant faced was Reconstruction...

...When Adams and such other elite Republicans as George Curtis and Charles Eliot Norton complained that Grant did not appoint men of intelligence and standing, they had themselves in mind...

...And the moral superiority of the debtors is the proper lesson of American history...

...But Grant in effect put the United States on the gold standard, creating a stable currency that provided for many years the basis of solid economic growth...

...Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” in 1893— came during the same era as the rise of the Populist movement and William Jennings Bryan’s campaigns for the presidency...

...And Grant actually made some moves away from it: He appointed a civil-service reform commission, and his treasury secretary, George Boutwell, instituted the first civilservice exam...

...The prosecution of Grant’s secretary Orville Babcock was promoted by a treasury secretary planning a run for the presidency, and Babcock was acquitted...

...Even as a general, he seldom said much, but he wrote his orders swiftly in a clear and graceful prose that left no doubt about their meaning...

...it is far inferior to the last...

...It is an argument full of significance for how we see the course of American political history...