The Worst President Ever

The historian H.W. Brands takes a sympathetic view of Ulysses S. Grant, typically the leading contender for the title:

The standard rap on Grant is that he was a drunk who surrounded himself with spoilsmen who stole the country blind. 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. Beyond that, the simple soldier was over his head in the White House. At a time of rapid economic change, he hadn’t a clue how to manage an increasingly sophisticated economy.

Considering the current state of the American economy, this last charge might now be the most damning, if true. But it’s not true. And Grant’s surprisingly sophisticated handling of economics, especially in the wake of the Panic of 1873, suggests that he deserves better from the historians than he has been getting.

Ruth Graham is less kind:

When the Panic of 1873 hit -- one major Philadelphia financial firm crumbled, pulling down other top firms and dozens of banks, and prompting mass layoffs by factories and railroads -- there was no reason to think that President Grant, a Civil War hero and a failed businessman, would be equipped to handle the first country’s first national depression. Brands admits it’s hard to know how much Grant’s decisions had to do with the country’s eventual recovery, but in his agonized decision to veto a bill that would have pumped quick cash into the economy to boost inflation, he sees evidence of “a more subtle thinker than he was deemed by contemporaries and most historians since.”

Brands sketches out how Grant’s reputation rose, and more often fell, according to political moods after he left office in 1877. For various reasons, his standing dropped as the soldiers who served under him began to die, again when Woodrow Wilson boosted the Klan, yet again during the Civil Rights movement, and again when superstar historian Eric Foner dismissed his approach to Reconstruction in the late 1980s.

Just about the only piece of Grant’s reputation that has survived the last 125 years intact is the brilliance of his memoirs, written as he was dying of throat cancer in 1885 and published posthumously by Mark Twain. Today he just may be poised for a comeback, thanks in part to few sympathetic biographies. Brands’s The Man Who Saved the Union is out in October.