Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb?

Two of America's most famous school child's questions are "What color is a white horse?" and "Who's buried in Grant's tomb?" I can answer the second.

Those of us who live in the northern part of Sonoma County daily pass by a road named Shiloh. Or we live on Grant Street, and it's time to learn why.

Many, who took history in high school, know that Grant graduated from West Point near the bottom of his class, fought in the war against Mexico (where we had the highest casualty rate per soldier in American history), served in the army in Sonoma County for a while and then resigned in disgrace because of drunkenness, failed in civilian life, and reentered the Union Army at the start of the Civil War, also known, in some places, as the War of Northern Aggression against Proud Illiterate Christians Defending Slavery (or something like that). During the war, the drunken but stubbornly heartless Grant achieved a measure of undeserved success by sending vast hordes of looting Union troops on stupid frontal assaults against tiny numbers of brilliant Confederate dudes, who would have prevailed if they had not fragged their best general, Stonewall Jackson, now a central name in gay rights history.

Most of the above is false, of course, a set of rumors first started in the North (by generals who wanted Grant's rank and by war correspondents who did their writing in the rear while running away with the other deserters) and later taken up by apologists for the South and its totally defeated army.

Part of the price by which Southern men were reconciled to the loss of access to slave women was a national glorification of Robert E. Lee and a denigration of Grant and the Union victories. Never mind that Grant's battles became the core study in military academies around the world (and unfortunately inspired the German army).

Robert E. Lee was, of course, one of several unusually able generals who fought for the South. At the start of the war, the best generals the country went with the South, one reason the South won so many early victories. They were the same generals that Grant defeated--Grant never lost a battle in his career or took a backward step. Of Grant, Lee later wrote: "I have carefully searched the military records of both ancient and modern history, and have never found Grant's superior as a general."

Grant was not a drunk, left the army because of low pay, and made a middle class living for his family in civilian life before the war. While the Union Army was slightly larger than the Confederate Army, in many of Grant's early battles, both sides had the same number of troops or Grant led the smaller force.

Among all the generals on the Union side, Grant was the only one who led successful offenses. His trademark in an attack was speed and the unexpected. For example, he mounted the first amphibious attack in modern warfare, coordinating the army and navy. His contribution was not simply tactics. Grant's strategy, the three pronged attack that included Shermon's' crushing march to the sea, cornered Lee and ended the awful fighting.

In a sense the decisive engagement of the Civil War came in 1862 at the battle of Shiloh where, for the first time in the conflict, two equal armies with two good generals met head on. Confederate General Albert Sydney Johnston's goal was to annihilate the Union Army, and he was a great general, but Grant destroyed the forces of Johnston (killed in battle) and Beauregard. After the battle, Grant noted that the South had fought hard and retreated in order. He understood what that meant: the war would be long and difficult. The South would have to be invaded and beaten on its own territory. Grant spent the next year trying to convince his superiors of the need to fight.

The South could have won. They were conducting a defensive battle around their own homes. They had interior railroads and rivers on which to move highly motivated troops rapidly from place to place. The North had to invade long distances and fight on unfamiliar ground, a logistical nightmare. But Grant was good at logistics. He was especially good at drawing relief maps of what lay ahead. He planned. His army moved food and ammunition.

Grant had to win fast. Democracies don't like long wars, and Lincoln seemed on the verge of being defeated for reelection. Grant did win, of course, at Appomattox Courthouse, where he granted generous terms to the South when Lee surrendered (Grant was not really an "unconditional surrender" man).

At the time the North was grateful. Grant was elected President twice, but he proved a political novice misled by Washington's corrupt elite. He did get some things right, though. He enforced the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, granting former slaves the right to vote, and he prodded congress into inventing the Justice Department to continue this work. "It is to Grant that we owe the institutionalization of universal suffrage and racial equality that we take for granted today," wrote John Mosier, historian. (For more on Grant, see Mosier's book with a foreword by General Wesley Clark, who ranks Grant first among America's military men.)

Reading about Grant has made me fonder of him. As a young husband, Grant planned to live out his life as a civilian in California, which he loved. He had not wanted an army career. His father had made him enter West Point for the free education. Grant's own goal was to become a math professor--he excelled at math--and he had a job lined up when the war with Mexico broke out. In his memoir Grant called that war "unholy," and he explained how the Americans had started it by advancing unprovoked into Mexico until finally the Mexican Army had to fight, at which point President Polk declared the country under attack. The motive for the war was to add Texas and other slave territories to the block of Southern states. As Grant saw it, the Mexican War was the start of the Civil War. In fact, Grant wrote that the Civil War was our punishment for what we had done to Mexico.

Grant's final act, completed at the behest of Mark Twain as Grant sat dying from cancer, was to write a memoir, the only Presidential memoir absorbed into the canon of American literature. Grant died within a week of finishing the book and providing an income for his wife.

That's who is buried in Grant's Tomb.

The Party of Loss

In the December HARPER'S, Corey Robin has republished an article on a phenomenon common to conservative politics from its inception. The conservative movement has relied on Tea Party populism, with its immoderation and adventurism, going back to the days of Edmund Burke.

My family illustrates the difference between two kinds of populism. My working class Irish mother's populism was a populism of hope. She reached adulthood at the start of the first Great Depression, and she had, to start with, nothing, not even a high school diploma. With nothing to lose, she had no more sense of loss than FDR. Instead she had hope. She was no victim. Her goal was to live day to day and put her children through college. She had no negative feelings about Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews, Gays, hookers or men.

My father came from a border state "Scotch-Irish" family that had been in America since the Revolution without making its way out of the working class; and he was the other sort of populist, the angry man who had suffered, as Corey Robin points out, a terrible loss. He was a victim, a white man who had lost his birthright, lost his place in the world as a member of a master race.

I have resisted, as too simple, the idea that the Teabaggers are racists with a grievance, and of course that is too simple. There is a strong component of populists in the tea party who have either suffered small financial losses or fear that they will soon suffer small financial losses. The Teabaggers tend to be old. They fear the end of Social Security (so, in their unproductive way, they vote Republican and demand a balanced budget). But what seems to drive the Tea Party most goes back to before the Civil War, when the Southern elite managed to convince the Southern white populist to fight for slavery, more or less on the grounds that every white person belonged to a class that was superior to black slaves.

My father did not believe that Blacks, Asians or Latinos were inferior--he was afraid that they weren't. He fought in a losing turf war, as he saw it, and his sense of loss turned his politics on its head. He moved from being an early supporter of FDR to being a committed follower of the NRA. Of course, he did not endorse racism, any more than Glenn Beck openly endorses racism today. Instead we see men and women practicing racism-once-removed by talking about closing the southern border and cutting entitlement programs. Euphemistic racism has become as American as apple pie.

My father, an admirable man in many ways, did not live to see a dark-skinned family in the White House, but that would have been for him a kind of ultimate end of his own special status. He would have joined with other angry "victims" and supported the populist party of emotional loss.

In the Heart of the Heartland

I suppose everyone knows that many of the Republicorp members of Congress believe that climate change (see the science of geophysics) is a fabrication invented by liberals as part of a plot to take control of the world. They also hold that the planet is 10,000 years old (so much for geology). They deny natural selection (cross off biology). They believe that a snake once talked and that a virgin once gave birth. These beliefs are common in the Heartland.

Many Heartlanders probably subscribe to related beliefs: that the blood of a black chicken will cure shingles; that the root of rhubarb worn on a string around your neck will prevent stomach aches; that cutting your hair in the dark of the moon will make you go bald; that burying a chicken head under a full moon will cure warts; etc.

Wittgenstein once said that if he met someone who claimed that he did not believe in science, Wittgenstein would not know how to continue the conversation. That's where we are today. It has become clear that a sizable number of us in the heart of our heartland reject science while, at the same time, using science to make weapons of war. We share this contradiction with certain jihadists.

The shock some of us feel, I think, comes from the realization that so many of our elected representatives reject geophysics, geology, biology, modern medicine, facts in general, and rational thought. These are the people with whom President Obama is attempting to converse. It is his job to represent them (and everyone else in the country), but how--unlike Wittgenstein--will it be possible for Obama to continue the conversation?

Geophysics

On Facebook, from time to time, I run into some fellow who pontificates about climate change, taking the position that climate change is just a theory supported by some scientists and denied by others. This thoughtless approach is often presented as a kind of lecture on uncertainty that may include a list of cases where the science of one era changes in a later era. For example, Newton's theory of gravity was superseded by Einstein's theory of gravity (actually I have yet to run across one of these skeptics who knew that Einstein had a theory of gravity).

Perhaps the best answer to this sort of pronouncement is to point towards the American Geophysical Union, the country's largest association of climate scientists. It recently announced that 700 of its members have agreed to talk to hostile audiences and defend the consensus view that climate change is happening and that in part it is the result of human activity. They are preparing a handbook on the human causes of climate change for use in secondary schools.

There is no way to answer another sort of skeptic, the paranoid who claims that climate change theory is a leftist plot. About 50 of the new Republican members of congress support this view, joining with older members like Congressman Darrel Issa of California. These walking meat tubes are now in a position to speed up climate change, which they will do, acting out their delusions. Anyone--like Ralph Nader-- who argues that it doesn't matter which party controls congress might want--for the sake of a planet humans find habitable--to reconsider.

News from the Republicorp

Until recently John Boehner (R-Ohio) was known mainly for combining two jobs, congressman and lobbyist. He's the dude who famously passed out tobacco lobby checks to fellow crooks on the floor of the House of Representatives. In the words of the song, he needed someone to help him scrape the mucous off his brain. Boehner is also famous for weeping in front of microphones (someone asked recently what would have happened if Nancy Pelosi had addressed the nation with tears streaming down her face). So Boehner is a red-faced booby, but what he's not is a Teabagger. Boehner is in politics--like any career Republicorp--for the hundreds of millions of dollars he can make in Wall Street payoffs.

The clash between the Republicorp millionaires and the Ayn Randian loonies of Teabaggertown has already begun.

I had noticed years ago that the Press Democrat's three or four person editorial board was pro-environment only as long as it did not interfere with corporate profits. The PD is a corporation, and its editorial board will defend business profits even if doing so makes the planet uninhabitable. That is their job. That is what the editors do for a living. The most recent example is their destruction of Pam Torliatt (using a Rovian fake "sanctuary" issue) and their Santa Rosa coup in electing profit-over-environment business puppets to the city council.

The PD's method is to join the Republicorp in secretly backing corporate Democrats to defeat genuine Democrats.

I canceled my subscription.

Hail California!

To state the obvious, we should thank the Teabaggers. They had a huge impact on Democratic victories in Nevada and Delaware. They never developed traction in California. Rep. Thompson defeated a Bagger easily. An incumbent Bagger in Cloverdale lost badly. The Republicorp now has a running sore to nurse: the Baggers control the Republican primaries but lose in most general elections.

In short, the Baggers can make Sarah Palin the Republicorp candidate for President in 2012. If they do, she will take the party to its worst defeat since Goldwater. As of today the race is on: Sarah Palin vs. the Republicorp establishment. It should be interesting to watch.