You have some good points here, especially where you “wonder if this debate is about much larger issues.”

To those who want to bash Grant’s generalship on the basis that he was a “drunk,” congratulations to their beloved General Lee, who lost to a “drunk” ! haha

On a more serious note, I say who cares if he was a drunk or not? It doesn’t change what happened on the battlefield, what happened as President, etc. The record is the record, and we can analyze it for what it is — and him being a drunk does not change that record. So I think you touch on something important here when you seem to suggest that focusing on this issue loses sight of the bigger (and historically more significant and influential) picture.

It reminds me of all the scandalous speculation surrounding Lincoln’s sexuality. I really don’t care, because it doesn’t change what Lincoln did in a realm of influencing history, especially as President.

Thanks for the Mailer and Fitzgerald references. You are thinking of Joan Waugh’s new study of Grant and historical memory: http://www.amazon.com/U-S-Grant-American-America/dp/0807833177/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270551851&sr=8-1 I read just about all of it, but don’t remember coming across any analysis of American fiction. I will have to check.

(1) Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead” is set in the WWII Pacific Campaign. Mailer was a war correspondent so the novel is pretty gritty and realistic. No spoilers, but there are many characters and viewpoints. The three main protagonists are a brutal, fascistic Sergeant, his liberal Lieutenant, and the General, an ambitious and self-serving individual. To illuminate the General’s character, it is recounted that at West Point, he argued for Grant over Lee as a strategist. For going against the conventional wisdom of the day, he receives a hazing from the class, and is described in the Class yearbook as “the Stragegist”. For a book written in the late 1940s, Mailer gets it pretty much right historically.

(2) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender is the Night”. This (spoiler alert!) recounts the fall of Dick Diver, a brilliant young psychiatrist who marries one of his wealthy and beautiful patients. The novel has parallels with “the Great Gatsby” but has a better claim to be Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. Dick adopts his wife’s idle, wealthy lifestyle and they move to Europe. But as Nicole (his wife) regains her mental health, he succumbs to alcoholism. They divorce and Dick moves back to the US, a tragic broken man. They keep in touch intermittently by letter (this is recounted in a sort of epilogue) but Dick seems to be living a shiftless life moving from small town to small town in rural New York state. Nicole retains some feelings for Dick, and thinks of him “like Grant at Galena”, a hero hidden in obscurity, awaiting his moment. Fitzgerald’s metaphor shows he had a working knowledge of Grant’s biography.

With Wilson’s praise of his writing and these references in fiction, it suggests that Grant’s image among American may have always been more sophisticated that the perception of a clownish drunk who made good.

[I know there is a recent book about Grant's "image" - I have not read it yet, so I am not sure if it treats of Grant's image in American fiction.]

I tend to agree with you, but it should also be pointed out that some of these rumors were furthered during the war by Northern politicians and officers as well. See Brooks Simpson’s biography on this issue.

Nice to hear from you and thanks for mentioning the blog in your response. Some myths die hard.

Thought you might enjoy this exchange, starting with the text of a letter I wrote this morning in response to an article in the Outlook section of today’s Washington Post:

Dear Ms. Wilson,

Thank you for your interesting reply. I appreciate that your piece was light-hearted, and the overall point is one that I believe true–Americans do love redemption. Overall I enjoyed the piece.

However, there are two things wrong with perpetuating this “tidbit.” One is that really is no dispute–no serious student of Grant’s life believes that whatever problem he might have had with the bottle affected his judgment during the war, or, more crucially, that he was ever drunk while his armies were in active operations (or his presidency for that matter).

Two, and more crucially, the largest contingent of those who wish to perpetuate the image of Grant as a drunk are doing so for their own purposes, and in this sense repeating discredited notions about a long-dead person can do real harm. A respected Civil War blog, Civil War Memory, neatly summarized this view last June:

“Believing that Grant was an alcoholic fits neatly into that larger image of a dirty/God-less/industrial North that stands in sharp contrast with a peaceful/agrarian South. Believing that Grant was a drunk reinforces his image as a “butcher” who achieved victory simply by massing overwhelming resources against Lee, the Army of Northern Virginia and the rest of the Confederacy rather than engaging in sophisticated and complex maneuvers. Finally, it reinforces the view that the United States army was made up of barbarians whose only goal was to pillage the good people of the South who wanted nothing more than to be left in peace.”

That Neo-Confederate trope is not one that I think the Washington Post, or any respectable writer, would wish to perpetuate.

Bill

On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 11:08 AM, Cintra Wilson wrote:
>
> Dear Sir:
>
> I take full responsibility for the historical view employed for that particular segment.
>
> This is a widely-held but somewhat scurrilous tidbit of history that is much disputed. My point was — he had a bad reputation as a drinker but overcame it well enough to become President.
>
> It’s not exactly a think piece. I doubt my utilizing of a disputed — but never fully refuted — bit of gossip about Grant is going to damage his reputation any further, in this context, or bring any serious Grant scholars to their knees.
>
> It’s a tabloid piece, to wit: it is meant to be a little over-the-top, for the sake of being ENTERTAINING.
>
> CW
>
>
>
>
>
> On Apr 4, 2010, at 8:00 AM, Bill Bergen wrote:
>
>> Text of letter sent to the letter of the editor of the Washington Post:
>>
>> Cintra Wilson’s “Don’t worry Tiger: We all love a second act” (Sunday, April 4, 2010) continues a long-discredited smear against Ulysses S. Grant.
>>
>> Grant, Wilson writes, “was infamous throughout his military career for being a staggering lush, given to dipsomaniacal benders” and cites two statements to support that proposition. One was from a general who, while assuring Grant of his admiration, was trying to undermine him to win a promotion for himself. The other source is a newspaper editor several hundred miles from the front who based his reports on those circulated by another general who was also seeking advancement.
>>
>> That Grant drank to excess occasionally seems clear. He resigned his commission in the pre-war army under unclear circumstances that might have involved drunkenness on duty. There are other plausible, but by no means clear-cut, accounts of Grant drinking to excess a few times while off duty during the Civil War. However, there is no creditable evidence that alcohol ever affected his battlefield performance and zero indication that Grant won at Vicksburg “despite being drunk.” As for the quote by Lincoln that “if he could find the brand of whiskey Grant drank, he would promptly distribute it to the rest of his generals,” there is no contemporary account of Lincoln saying any such thing.
>>
>> That the Washington Post, which has in recent years favorably reviewed books that demolishes these canards, would allow such drivel to be published is most disappointing.