U. S. Grant

September 14, 2009
How does national memory determine national heroes? Waugh, a UCLA history professor, probes the subject in an engaging study of the making of Ulysses S. Grant's reputation. At the time of his death in 1885, he was perceived as on a level with George Washington by former Unionists and Confederates alike. His memoirs were a bestseller. His image combined the honorable soldier and the generous victor: a heroic war leader who believed in the ideal of national reconciliation in both regional and racial contexts. Even Grant's flaws were part of his greatness, linking him to his countrymen in a distinctively American fashion. That image began to change as lost cause romanticism nurtured reinterpreting the Civil War as not merely tragic but arguably unnecessary. The eclipse of this approach has restored Grant's reputation as a general. Now his presidency is the target of criticism: corrupt, ineffective and above all incomplete in terms of the racial issue. Waugh convincingly interprets Grant as “symboliz both the hopes and the lost dreams” of the Civil War. But while that war remains our defining—and dividing—event, Grant's image, Waugh says, will remain ambiguous. 69 illus., 3 maps.

September 1, 2009
Waugh (history, Univ. of California, Los Angeles) explores the gap between historical perspective and collective memory that often shifts our sense of events or of figures within political, social, and economic contexts. Drawing upon Thomas L. Connelly's groundbreaking "The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society" and David W. Blight's more recent acclaimed "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory", she delves into the legacy of Ulysses S. Grant. Considering why, in the next century, Grant disappeared from popular memory, Waugh argues that after World War I a disillusioned population shunned the brutalities of war that Grant represented and that he was overshadowed by Robert E. Lee, who became closely identified with the Lost Cause interpretation of the war. By the early 1990s, Grant's reputation began to rise again as Lost Cause themes were dispelled and Grant's tomb was reopened to the public after a restoration. Ken Burns's award-winning Civil War documentary also showed Grant sympathetically. VERDICT This is a well-researched and scholarly work that Civil War enthusiasts will enjoy, provided they understand it's not meant to be a military or presidential biography. It would be an excellent supplementary text for graduate students and a welcome addition for academic libraries.Gayla Koerting, Nebraska State Hist. Soc., Lincoln

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