I
Naddition to the other windmills
New York City mayor Bill de
Blasio has been tilting at,
Gotham’s Don Quixote has com-
missioned a review of all the city’s stat-
ues, monuments, and memorials that
fevered activists have in some way found
“offensive.” Urgent voices have called,
for example, for the replacement of a stat-
ue of Thomas Jefferson—“a slaveholding
pedophile”—with a bust of Malcolm X.
The latest accession to the thought-police
line-up is Ulysses Simpson Grant.
In August, de Blasio was urged to
wipe the blot of Grant from the city’s
escutcheon, for Grant’s crime of issuing
in 1862 a general order banning “Jews
and other unprincipled traders” from
dealing in contraband cotton. “This is
complicated stuff,” de Blasio replied,
since Grant is an example of how, “for a
lot of people in this city and in this
country, they feel that their history has
been ignored or affronts to their history
have been tolerated.”
I do not envy the task Hizzoner has set
for himself. While it might not cost much
to give the heave-ho to the bust of Grant
in the Bronx Community College’s Hall
of Fame for Great Americans, or the
Grant bas-relief on the Grand Army Plaza
Soldiers and Sailors Arch, or the Grant
statue in Crown Heights, de Blasio and
the Sancho Panzas of the City Council
might need to reconsider demolishing astructure as architecturally epic as Grant’s
Tomb in Morningside Heights—unless,
of course, they propose exhuming Grant
and his wife from their Napoleonic sar-
cophagi and replacing them with, say,
Malcolm X.
Still, the mayor can scarcely do more
damage to Grant’s reputation than Grant
did himself. General evaluations of
Grant’s two terms as president (1869–77)
have been decidedly unfavorable. In
rankings of the presidents, he runs ahead
of Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan
but behind Millard Fillmore and Herbert
Hoover. His much more successful career
as the commanding general who com-
pelled the surrender of Robert E. Lee and
the main Confederate field army at
Appomattox in 1865, and thereby effec-
tively ended the Civil War, has also been
clouded by charges that his campaigns
amounted to nothing more intelligent
than attrition. “His talent and strategy,”
wrote an unappreciative Lee, “consists
in accumulating overwhelming num-
bers.” Grant, according to that noted
military expert Mary Todd Lincoln, was
“a butcher” and “not fit to be at the head
of an army.”
Phlegmatic and uncommunicative by
nature, Grant never responded to these
attacks during his life. But he could eas-
ily have pointed to his campaigns at
Vicksburg and Chattanooga, which
were models of swiftness, organization,
and grace. Even the bloody Overland
Campaign (which was forced on him by
the politicians) displayed a quickness
that repeatedly caught Robert E. Lee
napping and resulted in proportionately
fewer casualties for his own army than
for the Confederates.
Nonetheless, the conviction prevails
that, whatever genius he displayed as a
soldier, Grant was a dimwitted failure as
a politician. The presidency was his first
elected office, and it showed. His cabi-
net choices were announced to a chorus
of incredulity from Washington insid-
ers. When Grant left office in 1877, his
eight years were overshadowed by a
string of high-visibility scandals: Crédit
Mobilier, the “Whiskey Ring,” contract
fraud in the War Department, and
indictments of members of his closest
circle of advisers.
His reputation suffered blows even
after he left office. As naïve in business as
in politics, Grant allowed himself and his
family to be suckered into investing in aand among the most powerful of his
speeches, delivered dozens of times over
the final quarter-century of his life, was
“The Christian as Cretin”: a sermon, of
sorts, on the “apartness” devout Christians
will inevitably feel from secularized
friends. “Surely those who adhere to all or
most... traditional Christian beliefs are
regarded, within the educated circles
that you and I travel in,” he told Green
Bay’s St. Thomas More Society in 2010,
“as—well, simpleminded... by which I
mean those who do such positively
peasant-like things as saying the rosary,
kneeling in adoration before the Eucharist,
going on pilgrimages to Lourdes or
Fatima, and, worst of all, followingindis-
criminately (rather than in smorgasbord
fashion) the teachings of the Church.”
Readers will learn about a formative
event that occurred as Scalia was finish-
ing oral exams at Georgetown in 1957,
before matriculating to Harvard Law.
Walter W. Wilkinson of the history de -
partment posed what young “Nino,” as
the valedictorian was known then, con-
sidered a “softball” question: “Of all the
historical events you have studied, which
one in your opinion had the most impact
upon the world?” “How could I possibly
get this wrong?” Scalia asked rhetorically
on his return to Georgetown in 1998:
There was obviously no single correct
answer. The only issue was what good
answer I should choose. The French
Revolution perhaps? Or the Battle of
Thermopylae—or of Lepanto? Or the
American Revolution? I forget what I
picked, because it was all driven out of
my mind when Dr. Wilkinson informed
me of the right answer—or at least the
right answer if I really believed what he
and I thought I believed. Of course it
was the Incarnation. Point taken. You
must keep everything in perspective,
and not run your spiritual life and your
worldly life as though they are two sep-
arate operations.Liberal readers inclined to see Scalia’s
rulings on abortion, sodomy, and same-
sex marriage as unalloyed products of his
Christian faith, and not of textualism, will
learn from Scalia Speaks how he strove on
the bench to keep his religiosity in check.
“No matter how good a Catholic a
short-order chef may be,” the justice told
a Long Island audience in 1992, “there is
no such thing as a Catholic hamburger.
Unless, of course, it is a perfectly made
and perfectly cooked hamburger.”
SPONSORED BYNational Review Institute 41
Grant, by Ron Chernow
(Penguin, 1,104 pp., $40)Mr. Guelzo is the William Garwood Visiting
Professor in the James Madison Program at Princeton
University.An Innocent
At Home
ALLEN C. GUELZOText