Category Archives: Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

The Grants’ Governors Island

18 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by in Governors Island, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

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Many of America’s leading military figures spend at least part of their careers on Governors Island. Three generations of Grants served here.

The Block House

The Block House

Of all the Grants, Ulysses S. spent the least amount of time on the island. Captain Grant was here for all of a few weeks in the summer of 1852 just before he and the 4th Infantry went to the Pacific. A very pregnant Julia returned to Ohio while her husband lived briefly here in the Block House, which was officers’ housing in 1852. Grant visited Washington DC for a tried period and his trip to the capital coincidentally coincided with the death of Henry Clay. It was out West, far from his family, that he got into his drinking trouble.

Commanding officer's house

Commanding officer’s house

His son Frederick Dent Grant spent the most time here. He did two stints commanding the Department of the East in the 1900s and 1910s. As commander, he lived in this house. The plaque is a who’s who of the late 19th and early 20th century Army. IMG_1410 Here are a few interior shots. The city did a great job rehabbing this structure over the past year. This is also where Reagan met Gorbachev in the late 1980s. IMG_1413 IMG_1414Here is Major General Frederick Dent Grant at a garden party. We know that this image was taken in 1907 or later because the younger lady standing up is identified as Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant III. This was Frederick’s daughter-in-law. Her maiden name was Edith Root and she was the daughter of powerbroker Elihu Root. As Secretary of War in the Roosevelt Administration, Elihu Root returned Fort Columbus to its original name, Fort Jay. We know the photo is from 1907 or thereafter because Edith married Ulysses S. Grant III that year in a big Washington ceremony. 09434r Look closely at the image and you see that it was taken in front of the commanding officer’s house. This is evident because they are situated next to one of the canons, which you can see in the image of the house I took last week. Grant died the same week the Titanic went down in 1912. After he passed on in Manhattan, he was lay in state here in St. Cornelius. His good friend President Taft came to pay his respects.

the Chapel of St. Cornelius the Centurion

the Chapel of St. Cornelius the Centurion

10388r And here is his funeral. This is 26 April 1912. I did not know until discussing it with one of the rangers at Governors Island this summer that Frederick had a large funeral procession much the way his father had. Frederick Dent Grant is buried at West Point.

Ulysses S. Grand III as a young officer

Ulysses S. Grand III as a young officer

Last but not least there is Ulysses S. Grant III, grandson of the Civil War general and son of Major General Frederick D. Grant. Grant was a young officer during the Great War, holding many positions of responsibility at a very tender age. In the 1930s he was part of the II Corps stationed here in Pershing Hall.

Pershing Hall, rear

Pershing Hall, rear view

Pershing Hall, front view

Pershing Hall, front view

This was a difficult time for the American military. Officers such as Grant, Marshall, and Eisenhower toiled away in the 1920s and 1930s for the war that many knew would come. Having been so close to the negotiations at Versailles, Grant III knew that better than anyone. It is interesting to note that he and Edith’s daughter died in March 2014. It’s a good reminder that we are not talking ancient history here.

(the two Frederick Dent Grant images, Library of Congress; US Grant III portrait, Archive of U.S. War Department)

Julia Grant Dietz

26 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Those we remember, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

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Julia Grant Dietz at Grant' Tomb in 2000

Julia Grant Dietz at Grant’s Tomb in 2000

I noted with interest the passing this week of Julia Grant Dietz, the last remaining great grandchild of Ulysses S. Grant. Ms. Dietz was the daughter of Ulysses S. Grant III and Edith Root. Grant III was a military aide in the Theodore Roosevelt Administration. Among many other things, he later ran the Civil War Centennial Commission before stepping down midway through the commemoration. Edith Root was the daughter of powerbroker Elihu Root.

I often wonder what life is like for these descendants of historical figures. It must be a balancing act between protecting the family legacy and being honest and faithful to the historical record. This past Saturday a Roosevelt descendant dropped into the TRB. He was a man in his late 20s who lives now in Colorado. He told us he was in New York CIty on business, happened to be walking past the site, and so came in. A few months back he attended the Roosevelt reunion in Warm Springs, Georgia.

Ms. Dietz seemed to be active in preserving the Grant family memory. For one thing she was a trustee of the Grant Monument Association. Her son is Ulysses Grant Dietz, the eminent curator at the Newark Museum of Art. I noticed that she was long active in Planned Parenthood. One wonders how that must have gone down in the extended family. Her parents and grandparents were quite conservative after all.

(image/Grant Memorial Association)

14 Thursday Nov 2013

Posted by in Museums, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

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Jefferson Davis's Beauvoir

Jefferson Davis’s Beauvoir

It is hard to believe it is now 2 1/2 years ago, but at the start of the sesquicentennial there was a great piece in the USA Today about the descendants of various Civil War protagonists. If memory serves, they spoke to the relatives of Frederick Douglass, Jeb Stuart, and a few others asking them about their ancestors and what the Civil War means to them today. Last week Ulysses Grant Dietz and Bertram Hayes-Davis met at a professional gathering in Mississippi. Yes, as you may have figured, these are the great, great grandsons of U.S. Grant and Jeff Davis. Dietz is a curator at the Newark Museum of Art in New Jersey, one of the great cultural institutions in the Northeast. Hayes-Davis is the executive director of Beauvoir, the Confederate president’s estate near Biloxi. Apparently the two men are talking loosely of collaborating to whatever degree in the future, which would make sense given their shared histories and professions.

(image/Jeffrey Reed)

Easter morning coffee

31 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by in Monuments and Statuary, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President), Union League Club

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Ad Meskens

Happy Easter. I am sitting in the living room with my coffee and Kind of Blue is on the turntable. The windows open to the early spring warmth.

I was having a brief back-and-forth online the other day with someone about Grant’s Tomb. Specifically, we were talking about how far the monument had fallen during New York City’s lost years in the 1970s and 1980s. This excellent piece in yesterday’s Wall Street by Dennis Montagna of the Park Service about the Grant Memorial on the grounds of the national capitol got me thinking even harder about various Grant statues and monuments I have seen over the years. Built from roughly 1885-1922, the monuments initially reflected the nation’s sentiments for the man many put in the same class with Washington and Lincoln. After the horrors of the First World War the Grant the Butcher meme took hold and his standing went down precipitously in the coming decades. To visit Grant Cottage in Upstate New York one must enter the grounds of a medium security prison. People walk past the beautiful Grant statue in Brooklyn, across the street from what was the Union Cub, everyday without think twice about it. When I visited two years ago a woman who worked in the adjacent building said they always wondered who it was, which struck me as odd because his name in on the pedestal. Oh well.

In a sense these things are inevitable. It is not even just Grant. I have seen beautiful statues of Lincoln in places like Newark and Jersey City that are visited by no one except the homeless who now inhabit those areas. Time moves on. Demographics change. Once thriving industrial areas that could afford a statue in, say, 1913 have better thing to worry about a hundred years later. The recent immigrants of Flatbush–and it is the immigrants who have revitalized Brooklyn in the past 25-30 years–are concerned with educating there kids and moving on to bigger and better things, not the particulars of the old statuary in their neighborhood.

The major ones deserve are our attention, though. Great things have been done to revitalize the vicinity around Grant’s Tomb in Upper Manhattan. Hopefully, strides will be taken with the Grant Memorial on the capitol grounds. It would be great if they got rid of the ugly reflecting pool for starters. The Grant bicentennial (1822-2022) is just nine short years away.

(image/Ad Meskens)

Five minutes with Grant

21 Thursday Feb 2013

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The narrative is a little easy for those already familiar with the story of General Grant’s final days, but I thought I would pass along this short video. I especially loved the footage of Ulysses Grant Dietz toward the end. Dietz is an interesting figure in his own right. He did us all a great service several years ago when, working with others, he pressured the powers-that-be to clean up the tomb of his great, great grandfather.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o77mrKgvIjQ

 

Ulysses Grant Dietz, Vampire author

29 Monday Oct 2012

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I have never met Ulysses Grant Dietz, the great great grandson of the the general & president, but he comes across as a fascinating and dynamic individual. For one thing he is a senior curator of decorative arts at the Newark Museum, one of the finest museums in the country. It was he who led the pressure against the government to clean up Grant’s Tomb in the 1980s and early 90s, when the site was blighted with graffiti, crime, and drug use. The tomb reopened in 1997 for the 100th anniversary of its dedication. I had known that Dietz had published some art and design monographs. What I had not known until today was that he is also a novelist, of two gay vampire novel no less. He published his first novel in 1998–years before the contemporary vampire phenomenon went mainstream; that book was nominated for a Lambda Literary award in the Science Fiction/Fantasy. The sequel, Vampire in Suburbia, is available now. In this interview he talks about his work, fatherhood, his relationship of 37 years, writing and more.

A Grant soliloquy

14 Wednesday Dec 2011

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I saw this small vignette and thought I would pass along.

Two Grant books are on my short list of Best 2011 Reads. I learned much from Joan Waugh’s U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth, even if I did not agree with all of Professor Waugh’s conclusions. Charles Bracelen Flood’s Grant’s Final Victory: Ulysses S. Grant’s Heroic Last Year is a readable account of, as the subtitle suggests, Grant’s triumph over the health and financial difficulties he faced while toiling on his memoirs in 1884-85. Grant’s death was slow, painful, and very public. Flood is especially strong on the financial shenanigans that cost Grant and his family their fortune. So strapped for cash was Grant that when he left his Manhattan townhouse some mornings the former general and President of the United States often walked twenty to thirty blocks to and from his home to avoid paying cab fare.

A trip to Missouri and Illinois to see the Grant and Lincoln sites is in the early stages. Hopefully this will transpire in 2-3 short years.

Grant’s Tomb, the movie

10 Tuesday May 2011

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In the early decades of the twentieth century Grant’s Tomb was a rendezvous point for the young and amorous.  (Really)  I came across a wonderful silent film from 1904 that I thought I would share.  I find it interesting not so much for the film, which is enjoyable in and of itself, but for its stunning images of the mausoleum as it was less than a decade after its dedication.