The Battering of Horace Greeley


Ulysses Grant is one of my favourite American presidents, and last week I had occasion to chat about him with a friend. I always liked Grant, even before I visited his graffitoed, grown-over tomb near Harlem and Morningside Heights a decade ago. It's been cleaned up since then, but the shabby setting in the middle of Manhattan's world-city seemed somehow appropriate. This was, after all, the conqueror of Lee whom Guillaume depicted in shabby battle dress at Appomattox. To me, Lee always looks confused, and as though something was under his nose in that painting.

Grant was a failure in life who had enough humanity to know that his great achievement--saving the Union--was won at a horrible cost which should not, properly, be lauded. Later on, he became a tool of big interests, who led America to the Indian wars, a corrupt civil service, and the vast accumulation of private wealth in the hands of a monopolistic few.

Grant himself was demonised by Republicans who, after emancipation and the impeachment of President Johnson had nothing left to agree upon. Some were for hard money and gold; some were for inflation. Some were for Empire; some were for war and fraud upon the Indians. Some were for the enslavement of Chinese workers; some were for a reformation, so much so that they created a new Republican party, the Liberal republicans, whose greatest leader was a German who couldn't run for the Presidency.

Grant, of all the presidents until Eisenhower, knew how to deal with night riders and terrorists in the newly-formed Ku Klux Klan; he sent the army in and suppressed them. He got blamed for that too, by generations of polite racists, and the humiliating collapse of the 1876 election in electoral fraud, army seizure of ballots, and political decisions by members of the Supreme Court sitting in a commission was heaped on his head too.

Yet he saved the Union and spent a life chewing his cigar, painting, suffering, enduring and being, until throat cancer killed him. He made no money from office and was saved by Mark Twain's kindness from poverty. I wonder if, as he reflected on his life, he thought about the man he beat in 1872--the only man never to have won a single official vote in the electoral college, despite being nominated by two parties and winning a huge number of popular votes, Horace Greeley. (I say official, since 3 electors did vote for the dead man but were discounted).

Greeley went mad of a mixture of a broken heart and dementia before the electoral college met. He was committed to a mental hospital almost as soon as the election was over. In part, he was propelled towards this by the death of his wife, but as well by the vicious series of still extremely funny cartoons which Thomas Nast launched against him.

If you think that politics is not a blood sport, and that personal destruction has not always been de rigeur in democracies, have a look at the 'what I know about....' series of cartoons Nast launched against Greeley. Grant must have chuckled at them, but afterwards, I'd like to think he felt some pang of human regret at the impulse that compelled his side to take advantage of them. I'm in two minds about personal destruction in politics too, and I'm pleased to see that Barack Obama promised to sack anyone who sought to make Sarah Palin's children an issue.

Poor Greeley. I would have hated his moralism; his condescending distrust of the Irish; the cynicism of the racist, treasonous Democratic Party in its joint nomination of him; the naivete of the way he chose to make his prayer of twenty millions; and his unworldly righteousness. The battering he got, however, should still remind people what a dangerous set of pressures politics can unleash in democracies, and how dark its energies can be.

I don't think they will ever go away, because they come from everyone's reservoir of badness. Religion doesn't restrain them; some of the toughest operators in American politics, ever, were genuinely religious. Atheism doesn't necessarily unleash them.

I hope Greeley finally found some peace, however, at the end, and I hope Grant wished for that too.

A propos of nothing, here is my new favourite band, the National, and their song 'Fake Empire', which writing about the beginnings of a very real republican Empire made me think of.