Ron Chernow seems to have a niche.
The masterful biographer gained notoriety when his 832-page re-imagining of Alexander Hamilton was adapted into the famed Broadway play that carries the Founding Father's surname. It would seem that his much more recent publication, an even longer (over 1,100 pages) examination of the life of Ulysses S. Grant, attempts to tackle a subject that is, in many ways, similar to Hamilton.
Not that you would imagine the men were altogether similar if you were to read the details of their lives. Hamilton essentially developed the American financial system; Grant was naive at best with money and often broke. Hamilton, even by those who disliked him, has often been regarded as one of the most intelligent Founding Fathers; Grant has often been ridiculed for a perceived lack of intelligence when compared to other Presidents and leading generals.
In Chernow's chronicles, the two are united not by their own actual accomplishments and traits, but by the calculated success history has had in rewriting them out of the narrative, to paraphrase Lin-Manuel Miranda's play. It is that sad side of these great Americans' legacies that should be alarming.
Hamilton was once revered by a large swath of the American people, one of George Washington's most trusted confidantes and someone to whom the nation looked for advice even after his implication in what effectively was the nation's first political sex scandal. Likewise, Grant was also considered to be among the nation's most preeminent leaders, with prominent Americans from Mark Twain to Walt Whitman to even Frederick Douglass placing him level with Washington and Lincoln in ranking America's presidents. He was the general who Abraham Lincoln trusted above all, the one who won the Civil War, and he became a strong champion of African-American rights in his presidency; in fact, some southern state legislatures rapidly (though briefly) saw a majority of black representation in government, owed in part to Grant's use of the military to curb violent voter suppression by white supremacists.
And yet just over a week ago when I was in New York City, Grant's tomb (the largest mausoleum in the country) was virtually empty. In over half an hour, maybe five or six people entered the building of the man who won the Civil War and presided over most of Reconstruction.
For Hamilton, buried over a hundred blocks south by Manhattan's Trinity Church, there was a similar lack of attention until Miranda's play reached its hit status.
For quite some time (and still some today) many Americans probably could only tell you little, if anything, about these two men, and though they are long deceased, the fact that we have so easily forgotten them is an ominous warning for America. In the wake of their deaths, their opponents have taken great efforts to blot out their achievements, in service of their hopes that the principles of Hamilton and Grant would die with them.
Hamilton had powerful enemies in men like Thomas Jefferson, who staunchly opposed his financial system. It is a testament to Hamilton's genius that he crafted a system that even Jefferson could not undo. Grant, on the other hand, saw his legacy erased shortly after his Presidency.
Not long after Grant left office, Reconstruction was deemed a failure and abandoned for dead. Though the process brought then-unprecedented representation and rights to African-Americans in the South, many "progressives" began to side with conservatives, tired of the use of military force needed to keep groups like the Ku Klux Klan at bay. In schools today, though, we don't focus on the significant achievements of Reconstruction; we simply call it a mistaken process and wonder if Lincoln might have handled it better, ignoring the fact that in some ways it produced more representation for African-Americans than would exist until the late 1900s.
It's not hard to see why a visionary and war hero like Grant was forgotten—racists who didn't like his support of African-American rights would certainly have had something to gain from painting a picture of a weak Grant, thus discouraging further Presidents from following his example. So it was that as Jim Crow took root and began to rise in the South, people began to exacerbate the claims of corruption in Grant (though his administration likely had corrupt practices, he was likely naive and unaware of many of them).
Why, though, does this matter today?
History is the basis upon which we make our decisions. This is true, personally—if I didn't like a certain type of food, for example, I wouldn't eat it again —and also in our national decision-making. However, if the historical narrative can be rewritten to fit what one wants others to see, they can find justification in their actions and potentially convert others to them, as well.
This is a significant piece of how racism was allowed to thrive for so long in the South. People were taught that Reconstruction had failed and that African-American governance was bound to be unsuccessful, when in fact the only reason African-Americans were voted out of office after their brief time as a majority was because African-American (and white progressive) Southern voters were violently suppressed. So this rewritten version of history, then, could be used to bolster racist claims of superiority which had no grounds.
The only difference today is that people can get their history from a variety of different sources. Many people simply look for the source that aligns with their bias. It is for this reason that I have a passion for history, a passion for teaching individuals to look at the objective facts of our story and make a decision based upon them.
We have said that history repeats itself, but the truth is perhaps a little different. We repeat history because some people skew our understanding of it in order to maintain their grip on power. You may not think that the stories of dead people matter, but just look at what happened when we didn't closely examine the story of Grant and Reconstruction—not only was a man left unappreciated, but an appalling and inhumane system of segregation was given further fuel on which to thrive.
