The Public Eye: Joan Waugh - U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth (Civil War America)

From Publishers Weekly
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[ing] 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.