Taking Heroes For Granted
The most merciless view of history will in time condemn us all.
This week’s post is by contributor Johan Pregmo.
In the comparatively quaint days of the early-mid 2010s, when “white supremacist” still referred to actual skinheads and not half of the country, the US culture wars raged over whether to remove Confederate symbols from public land. It was a fairly clear-cut issue. As much as conservative Southerners insisted that taxpayer-funded rebel flags and monuments were a matter of “heritage, not hate”, the truth is that the statues were largely erected during the 1950s to intimidate black people. Confederate General Robert E. Lee was himself opposed to glorifying the past wounds that tore his nation apart. Even if it were only about honoring the sacrifice of the soldiers who fought for their country and not the atrocious cause for which they bled and died, we don’t see very many statues of SS officers in Germany. Many Nazis and Confederates alike surely showed bravery and valor on the battlefield — but that doesn’t mean their legacy is worth honoring today.
As social justice politics descended into madness, however, the critical eye once reserved for slavery-defending traitors and their racist admirers was turned indiscriminately toward the entire past. Even to Ulysses S. Grant, the nobody-turned-general-turned-president. A dominant figure of his era, with fabled deeds like defeating the Confederacy, breaking the first wave of the Ku Klux Klan, and securing black voting rights, Grant has earned his spot on the right side of history, hasn’t he? But alas, he was in some respects a man of his time who failed to anticipate and embody every step of moral progress that was to transpire over the next two centuries. For some people, no act of positive change, no matter how momentous, is sufficient to absolve the sin of moral imperfection. In the hysteria of 2020, a statue of Grant was torn down and defaced by outraged protesters in California, citing Grant’s racism and slaveholding. This was cheered on or shrugged off by left-wing commentators. Grant, it seems, had been swept aside as just another dead, white, racist man. A closer look at Grant, however, reveals a man of principle and character, a man whose moral arc culminated in ardently championing black rights, both as a general and as a president — a man worthy of respect.
Like most attempts to sum up a person by the worst thing they ever did, to simply say that “Grant was a slave owner” and walk away is to miss the plot entirely. Grant married into a slave-owning family, and appears to have expressed no strong opinions on slavery as a young adult. In the late 1850s, he was given a slave named William Jones, who had belonged to his father-in-law. This made Grant the last president ever to have owned a slave. But within a year, in 1859, Grant gave Jones his freedom.
To fully appreciate the gravitas of this action, we must understand Grant’s situation. He was financially struggling at the time and could have sold Jones for a life-changing amount of money, but rather than indulge in this inhuman practice, Grant chose the high road. As Ta-Nehisi Coates put it: “He inherited a slave through his wife, and he freed the slave. But you have to understand what that meant in the 1850s… It would be like walking away from your house, but he just did it on moral principle.”
What we see here is a journey of ethical progress — going from an indifferent if indirect participant in an abhorrent system to actively choosing to reject it and walk a better path. Is that not a mark of character? To choose to disregard all good a historical figure did, and to judge them only by how they handled issues that were genuinely contentious and not taken for granted, is to choose a skewed, ignorant understanding of the past.
Human history has been messy from the beginning. For two hundred thousand years we’ve been vicious to each other, and in the seven thousand years we’ve had civilization, the brutality has only escalated. The Roman Empire enslaved and tortured its way through most of the known world. Medieval times saw gruesome torture methods put on as public entertainment. Slavery is as old as the historical record. It has been practiced by nearly all peoples. And yet we not only assign our own troubled past a special status of evil above and beyond the rest of human depravity; we hold our historical figures to the same modern, centuries-evolved standard we have now. It's like looking down at a caveman for not being able to do algebra. What’s worse, it paints a distortedly warped view of history where everyone is simply evil, to a greater or lesser degree.
Mahatma Gandhi was an overt racist. Does this defect undermine his accomplishments? Does it somehow lessen the importance of liberating India from the British Empire, or setting an example for the power of nonviolent protest that would lead to civil rights victories around the world? Or George Washington, who, although a slave owner, defined the American experiment by choosing to abdicate his power after only two terms, rightly earning the nickname of the “American Cincinnatus” and laying a milestone for US democracy whose importance cannot be overstated. When Winston Churchill led the European charge against the Nazis, is that negated by his bigotry toward Indians or his disastrous WWI military record? Is standing up to a much greater evil worth nothing? Is there no sense of reconciling the good with the bad to see the bigger picture?
These are not rhetorical questions. Really ask yourself. Think about it for a second. Engage with the issue. Which view of history allows for a broader, more reasoned understanding of our world — the one where everyone born before 1990 is a moral monster, or the one where people are complicated, full of multitudes, and inescapably influenced by the circumstances in which they lived?
What would happen if we put those historical figures we still admire through this same ethical wringer? Would Martin Luther King Jr., a deeply religious spiritual leader of the 1960s, have views conforming to 2023 Twitter’s consensus on LGBT issues? How many heroic people in history would we have to condemn on those grounds alone? What would Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and Jonas Salk have thought about trans and non-binary people? We don’t know — and yet, of course we do. It is easy to sneer back at our forebears’ imperfections, but those who do so forget that we stand on the shoulders of giants. Just as scientific, medical, and technological progress depends on having older iterations to build off of, so too does moral progress. The ancient Romans would have had no understanding of why wars of conquest and slavery were wrong — it was what everyone did, given the chance. Ethical norms only changed because of centuries of gradual, haphazard baby steps that slowly changed cultures and values.
It’s worth pondering on the inevitable: one day, we too might be looked at the same way. Decades or centuries from now, how will posterity view our participation in the exploitation of animals, the rape of the environment, or whole industries built off of sweatshops? Are we any freer than King, Churchill, and Grant? Are we any less a product of our culture, environment, and genetics? Will those who come after us be as dismissive of the context of our lives as we increasingly are of those who came before us?
It is important for a society to have role models; to have iconic figures whose character and deeds are celebrated. This isn’t to advocate blind hero worship. The bad must be taken with the good, but all the same, we should not let people’s shortcomings prevent us from admiring their accomplishments.
History has not been kind to Grant. His reputation was in the gutter for many decades, and he was consistently ranked in the lower half of presidents by historians — and often in the bottom 10. Only recently has his standing improved. He has been accused of corruption, alcoholism, racism, and being a butcher on the battlefield — and yet at the end of the day, his accomplishments speak for themselves, as does his character.
Grant is not without his blemishes. Some of the worst crimes committed against Native Americans occurred during his time in office. His presidential administration was also marked by corruption, and although Grant was not personally implicated, he certainly seems to have often placed trust in the wrong people. He still defeated the slave owners, secured black voting rights and destroyed the Ku Klux Klan. These are towering milestones in American history that loom so large they almost eclipse the figure who drove them into being.
Grant was decent, modest, and brilliant in his way. He was a hero, but also still just a man — stains and all. No less a giant than Frederick Douglass eulogized Grant as “A man too broad for prejudice, too humane to despise the humblest, too great to be small at any point. In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.” Americans could do a lot worse than Ulysses S. Grant for someone to look up to.
See also: “The Paradox of Trashing the Enlightenment”
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