Some idiot1 is proposing that Ronald Reagan’s smirking visage replace Ulysses Grant’s face, currently on the fifty dollar bill2. Isn’t it enough of a travesty that the criminal Ronnie Reagan has an airport named after him? No Reagan, no George Bush3, enough said.
As president, Grant was determined to achieve national reconciliation, but on the terms of the victorious North, not the defeated Confederates. He fought hard and successfully for ratification of the 15th Amendment, banning disenfranchisement on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude. When recalcitrant Southern whites fought back under the white hoods and robes of the Ku Klux Klan, murdering and terrorizing blacks and their political supporters, Grant secured legislation that empowered him to unleash federal force. By 1872, the Klan was effectively dead.
For Grant, Reconstruction always remained of paramount importance, and he remained steadfast, even when members of his own party turned their backs on the former slaves. After white supremacists slaughtered blacks and Republicans in Louisiana in 1873 and attempted a coup the following year, Grant took swift and forceful action to restore order and legitimate government. With the political tide running heavily against him, Grant still managed to see through to enactment the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited discrimination according to race in all public accommodations.
Grant did not confine his reformism to expanding and protecting the rights of the freed slaves. Disgusted at the inhumanity of the nation’s Indian policies, he called for “the proper treatment of the original occupants of this land,” and directed efforts to provide federal aid for food, clothing and schooling for the Indians as well as protection from violence. He also took strong and principled stands in favor of education reform and the separation of church and state.
[Click to continue reading Sean Wilentz- Who’s Buried in the History Books? – NYTimes.com]
Compared to Reagan, I chose Grant.
Born to humble circumstances, Grant endured personal setbacks and terrible poverty to become the indispensable general of the Union Army. Although not himself an abolitionist, he recognized from the very start that the Civil War would cause, as he wrote, “the doom of slavery.” Above all, he despised the Southern secessionists as traitors who would destroy democratic republican government, of which, Lincoln said in his first inaugural, there was no “better or equal hope in the world.”
Reagan on the other hand, was responsible, directly or indirectly, for massive deficit spending, increasing military budgets, Iran-Contra, the Savings and Loan debacle, Antonin Scalia, escalating the Drug War, demonizing liberals, demonizing gays, demonizing the poor, and a thousand more crimes against man and state.
Grant undoubtedly had flaws, but nobody who voted for or against him is still alive. Why throw him in the dustbin of history?
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