History's Headlines: Grant wins the heart of South Bethlehem
from WFMZ - by Frank Whelan CWRT Board Member Aug 13, 2022
It’s the summer of 1869 in South Bethlehem. Gentlemen’s hats are high, cigars and whiskey plentiful and antimacassars, those little doilies designed to protect the backs of chairs from greasy male hair oil, are much in evidence. And on August 19 of that year, citizens were looking forward to something special: a visit from the President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant.
It is the high noon of America’s post-Civil War boom, and the Bethlehem Iron Company was shipping its rails around the country at a breakneck pace. A shipment had been sent around Cape Horn to San Francisco a year before for the Central Pacific Railroad that on May 10, 1869 joined the Union Pacific at Promontory Point, Utah, completing the nation’s first trans-continental railroad. That year Grant would oversee the completion of another railroad from Sacramento, California to Omaha, Nebraska. Not resting on its laurels, Bethlehem Iron that year sent executives Robert Sayre and John Fritz to Europe to investigate the new steel rail-making technology being developed there. Closer to home in Allentown the Board of Trade boasted it was possible to read a newspaper at three o’ clock in the morning by the light of that city’s iron rail mills working through the night.
It was also a time when political change brought on by the Civil War was recognized when Grant signed enforcement acts to suppress the Ku Klux Klan violence in the South and witnessed in 1870 the election of Joseph Rainey of South Carolina as the first Black person elected to the House of Representatives. Grant was also a vigorous supporter to the ratification of the 15th amendment to the Constitution, giving rights to recently enslaved Black people as citizens.
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At this distance of time, it may be difficult to appreciate Grant the way the people of his time did. Into the end of the last century, because of many scandals in his administration that were uncovered, none of which Grant personally profited, he was regarded by historians as a do-nothing president almost certainly at the bottom of the barrel and probably a drunk. Prior to 1999 the vast majority of Grant biographers either ignored Grant’s presidency or portrayed it as a failure. In 1935 the influential and flamboyant University of Wisconsin historian William B. Hesseltine (according to one account by Ralph Havener, later archivist for the University of Missouri, and one of his graduate seminar students, Hesseltine used to stab unsatisfactory student papers in a pile with a large knife) wrote “Ulysses Grant: Politician,” the standard biography of Grant whose negative view of the man prevailed among biographers for the rest of the century. In a ranking of presidents done by historians in the 1950s, Grant was rated as a failure in the White House. “Grant was a loser,” Hesseltine wrote. ”Even the dogs didn’t like the man.”
It was not until 1999 with Frank Scaturro’s “President Grant Reconsidered” that the historical tide began to turn. Many current biographers have taken another look and discovered that this view of Grant came from detractors in the 19th century, mostly political opponents, or condescending New Englanders like Henry Adams, who felt Grant lacked the sophistication or intelligence to be president and was “pre-intellectual, archaic and would have seemed so even to cave-dwellers.” As New England historians wrote the textbooks for the nation in that era, the pattern was set.
But for folks in his time, at least in the North, Grant was a hero. Not that it was always so. Born in Ohio as the first of six children he was said to have been a small, sensitive, quiet boy who early showed his talent training horses. Grant entered West Point in 1839 where he excelled in mathematics, writing, and…
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