Beyond that, the simple soldier was over his head in the White House. In an era of scandals-the Crédit Mobilier’s siphoning of millions in the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the Tweed Ring’s bilking of New York in awarding city contracts, the Whiskey Ring’s dodging of the tax on booze-Grant was said to turn a blind (or drunken) eye to all manner of wrongdoing. The standard rap on Grant is that he was a drunk who surrounded himself with spoilsmen who stole the country blind. And while today he has managed to put a little more distance between himself and last place, it is still no surprise to find him in the bottom half, if not among the bottom ten. In a 1948 poll he rated ahead of just Warren Harding by 1982 he had only clambered past James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. Surveys of presidential scholars long placed Grant among the worst presidents. But later generations found him entirely dispensable, and he became the butt of historians’ jokes. Grant was a hero to his generation: the greatest general of the Civil War, a popular president who was elected twice-and could have been elected three or four times had he wished. Each generation finds the heroes it needs. The changing views of historical subjects reflect new information-Jefferson traditionalists are having an ever-harder time denying the DNA evidence that Jefferson fathered children by his slave Sally Hemings-but also the evolving attitudes of those viewing the past. Morgan reportedly toasted the success of the lions when TR went off on a postpresidential safari), but he became a bipartisan favorite in the late twentieth century. Theodore Roosevelt was simultaneously the scourge of the Democrats in his day and a wild-eyed radical to Wall Street (J.P. Thomas Jefferson was the Antichrist to his Federalist contemporaries, a demigod to several succeeding generations, a hypocrite to civil rights advocates of the 1960s, and various other things since.
#Ulysses grant torrent#
The story of our past is always a work in progress, an endless torrent of writing and revision.
If they were, historians would run out of things to say. H istory’s judgments are never definitive.
0 kommentar(er)
