Anti-climax

MEET GENERAL GRANT--W. E. Woodward--Liveright ($5.00).

The Man. Gruff soldier with heart of gold and will of iron, brilliant in strategy, steadfast in courage--nothing dandified in his uniform, nothing lily-livered in his perpetual cigar, nothing watered about his liquor--such is, and will be, the popular impression of victorious U. S. Grant, modern biographers to the contrary.

To begin with, his name was not even the U. S. Grant of fame and fancy, but Hiram Ulysses Grant--the initials proudly etched in brass tacks on the trunk he was to take on his unwilling way to West Point. Suspecting that fellow cadets would guy him for initials H. U. G., he plucked out the tacks, signed himself reversely Ulysses Hiram. But the registrar had him down as Ulysses Simpson Grant (an absent-minded senator had assumed the mother's maiden name) and refused him admittance without authorization from Washington. Ulysses, characteristically impatient of government red tape, made short shrift by changing his signature to U. S. Grant.

Beyond that, he distinguished himself at West Point by slovenliness of person, mediocrity of scholarship, hatred of firearms, and a certain girlish squeamishness of profanity and rough jokes. His femininity was emphasized by a callow appearance--indeed, during leisure hours of the Mexican War, Grant took the part, in amateur theatricals, of Desdemona, no less.

It was in these same leisure hours that Grant took to "solitary drinking" because (his present biographer is a disciple of passe Freud) he had no Mexican mistress, shrank from raucous army companions, refused to attend a second bullfight. Considerable drunkenness was overlooked in those days, but Grant's must have been more than considerable, for he drank himself out of the army, thereby blundering upon the road to fame. If he had stayed in the army, which he detested and disapproved but hadn't the initiative to quit, he would have had a conventional small command in the Civil War. As it happened, he was drifting from farmer pillar to salesclerk post, miserably deficient in supporting his family, scorned by relatives and Illinois townsfolk, when the war started. Grant decided he must repay the government for his free, if meager, education at West Point. For months his desultory applications for a command were ignored, but when the need for better generalship grew desperate, a trick of chance politics brought him to the crucial command in Tennessee.

His first conspicuous victory was greeted with Union-wide exultation, and curiosity as to this unknown U. S. ("Unconditional Surrender") Grant. Journalists glossed their ignorance with fantastic tales of Grant riding casually to battle, coat un buttoned, cigar in mouth. Immediately the hero was deluged with boxes of cigars --10,000 in quick order -- and though he gave hundreds away, "having such a quantity on hand I naturally smoked more than I would have done under ordinary circumstances, and I have continued the habit ever since."

The war gloriously won, in spite of tactical errors at Shiloh, brutal human waste at Cold Harbor, Grant was unfortunately awarded the presidency. He knew nothing about politics or human character, neither of these imponderables being tangible matter of action. His chosen advisers were crooked or incompetent (the minister to England, a poker expert, taught the game to British peers, started a fad), his policies pathetic; but grimly he stuck to both. Scandals rivaling Teapot Dome culminated in the gold corner by Gould and Fisk, shrewd rascals who dazzled Grant with their powerful wealth, involved the honest dupe in fiasco.

Years later Grant flattered himself that he too was a Wall Street potentate, only to learn in tragic finale that again he had been duped, used, ruined. Yet, under stress of terrific pain (cancer) his pathetic persistence in scribbling memoirs that would support his widow is the courageous characteristic that well overshadows faults and stupidities.

The Significance. While other generals were tracing with blood and gore elaborate patterns of Napoleonic strategy, Grant defied all the rules, applied common sense, accomplished feats that Napoleon would proudly have claimed. All this can be gleaned from Woodward's interesting if arbitrary and cavalier account, but his great general is only too often submerged in the man, shiftless, gullible, pathetic.

The Author. When Woodward was a small boy in South Carolina he read a book which proved the South had won the Civil War. Such was his surprise when he later learned otherwise that his curiosity, permanently caught, culminated in his study of Grant. In between time, however, he was advertizing man, banker, author of Bread and Circuses, George Washington, and admitted originator of the word "debunk." Patriots, private as well as professional, cavilled at his .debunking of George Washington, will carp at the same treatment of Grant. Of Washington, Author Woodward replied he had made no effort to "show him up"; had merely tried to humanize him. Of Grant he will no doubt say the same.