Our current President makes all Presidential biographies about himself. He challenges and flouts so many of the customs and norms of the American President, I can’t help thinking about him when I read about any other chief executive. Each episode in our history provides a study by contrast.
A week ago, I finished Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, which I have since seen cited twice (once on television). Numerous sources ascribe to it the phrase “a masterpiece of the genre.” Now, Grant said very little about his Presidency in his memoirs. Perhaps he wanted to dwell on events that went better for him, like failed businesses. But in his observations about the country, he frequently provides an interesting contrast to the successor who currently occupies the Oval Office.
For instance, Forty-Five likes to talk about traitors. Well, Grant dealt with actual traitors: people who violated their oaths of office and military duty and took up arms against their country. Grant never lets the Confederacy have its way with semantics; he always refers to its “government” in quotation marks. But what does a republic do when it achieves victory over a rebellious army? How does a government "for the people" treat 5.5 million of those people who for four years have been loyal to a rebellious “government” once that rebellion has been quelled? Grant believed that the victory he did so much to bring about made immediate compatriots of these former enemies and abettors to enemies. He couldn’t rejoice over Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House. “I felt like anything,” he says, “rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”
In this remarkable observation, Grant walks straightly (and soberly!) along a fine line in which he both praises his fellow Americans for traits he can admire and blames them for taking up an execrable cause. (And by the way, Grant says from the beginning of his account of the war that that inexcusable cause was slavery. No side-stepping the elephant and talking about states’ rights. Grant, having been sentient during the 1850s knew the cause of the Civil War.) I believe he was right in everything that I know he said and felt and did at that surrender, but it took subtlety of thinking, the ability to see both sides of an argument in the best light possible and then to choose on principles, the wisdom to understand that a human being is a mixed bag. I know these are difficult virtues to achieve, but they are too shockingly rare these days. No one can find praise for those who, they believe, take up poor causes. And no one upholding any cause can hear critique of that cause without taking it as a personal attack. We no longer understand the difference between opponents and enemies.
Grant has only a few words to say about his disastrous predecessor as President, Andrew Johnson, and those are to say that Johnson did the wrong thing in trying to punish fellow Americans from the South for having taken up the wrong cause. Grant virtually said, “We need a uniter, not a divider.” I’ve heard too many times in the last twenty years – from friends variously embracing all portions of the political spectrum – that they wish they didn’t live in the same country with those who oppose them politically. This attitude seems to me so completely un-American that I’m tempted to agree with it just long enough to get rid of those who hold it. But, trying not to be a walking oxymoron, I don’t. Part of our country’s ideal is precisely the ability to live in community with people who differ from us politically. We take recourse to the ballot box, we challenge what we see as injustice through the courts, we lift our voices in the street, we post signs in our yard. But we don’t shoot our political rivals, we don’t jail our political rivals, we don’t force our political rivals to leave the country, and we don’t abandon the nation to our political rivals. Yes, it’s an ideal very, very imperfectly realized. But the ideal says that we must shake our rival’s hand (when not in the midst of a pandemic!) and vow to remember that we agree on something really quite astonishing and weird in the history of this weird, old world: laws and debate and free elections cut way down on killing. So now let’s apply those laws fairly, debate honestly, and make our elections equally accessible to all eligible voters.
I started off thinking I would talk about Grant’s other fine lines of subtle thought, but I’ve ranted on the first one for too long. Science fiction next. That couldn’t possibly get political, right?
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