President Reagan alone in the Oval Office 1984. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Life After the Oval Office

Presidential Legacies

02.16.18

In honor of President’s Day, Joanne, Brian, and Nathan explore the ‘afterlives’ of presidents: what do they do with their time once they’re out of office — and how do we remember them once they’re gone?

presidency; presidents

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Dear John

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were friends for years – until they both entered politics on the new national stage. Joanne and historian Richard Bernstein explore their post-retirement reconciliation, and a new friendship conducted entirely via letter.

Music:

Collapsing Slo-Mo by Podington Bear
Cloudbank by Podington Bear
Clair De Lune (Pianet, Moog, and Brushes Arr.) by Podington Bear

friendship; presidents; writing

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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JOANNE: Thanks for downloading this episode of BackStory on the lives of presidents after they leave office. If you enjoy this BackStory, check out BackStoryRadio.org. There’s plenty more about presidents where this comes from.

BRIAN: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NATHAN: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory.

BRIAN: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines I’m Brian Balogh.

NATHAN: I’m Nathan Connelly.

JOANNE: And I’m Joanne Freeman.

NATHAN: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians. And each week, we explore the history of one topic that’s been in the news.

JOANNE: Speaking of the news, this week, you may have seen two familiar faces in an unfamiliar style, as the National Portrait Gallery unveiled the official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama. Portraits are just one of the honors likely to head your way if you are a former president of the United States. In fact, there’s now a whole landscape for the modern post-presidency, taking in memoirs, speaking tours, presidential libraries, and charitable foundations that often serve to cement a president’s legacy.

In today’s show, we’re going to be exploring the post presidency and asking, how did it take shape? To start, we’re going to turn back to two early presidents, one sitting in his study in Braintree, Massachusetts, and the other at home just down the road from our studios here in Charlottesville. I’m talking about presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, of course. And perhaps I should be more correct and say ex-presidents, because we’re catching them in 1812, and both of these men have left office.

BRIAN: Well, that certainly gives them a lot more time to sit around their studies, Joanne.

JOANNE: It definitely does. And above all, it gives them a chance to write, to write letters to friends, to family, to each other.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: They have launched into an amazing intellectual adventure on paper.

JOANNE: That’s a good friend of mine, Richard Bernstein. And he has spent a lot of time reading their letters to each other, as have I.

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: These letters are just amazing. I mean, you read them and you get a sense of John Adams. He’s an old man, about 77 years old when he starts writing this retirement series of letters. And he writes up until after he turns 90. And he’s every bit as adventurous, and youthful, and playful as he was when he was a teenager writing in his diary. Jefferson, I think, is a little more conscious of what the Romans called gravitas and dignitas.

JOANNE: Adams and Jefferson had been friends all through the Revolutionary War and for years after. But beginning in the late 1790s, because of their politics, they became less and less friendly. You may remember that they actually ran against each other in the election of 1800. It was a really nasty election with a lot of mudslinging on both sides, and their friendship didn’t survive it.

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: They sit in a stew of funk and resentment for what really is nearly 12 years.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOANNE: These letters were their reconciliation after not speaking to each other for over a decade. You kind of get the sense that it opened up the floodgates of all the things they would have loved to discuss with each other. The two wrote to each other constantly pretty much for the rest of their lives. If you look at the dates of their letters, sometimes they’re writing nearly every day.

NATHAN: And I bet that kept the post office busy.

BRIAN: Hey, you’re not kidding, Nathan.

[LAUGHTER]

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: They marveled, by the way– they love it only takes a week for a letter to get from Braintree to Monticello or from Monticello to Braintree. Now, I don’t know if you remember when we were first getting to know each other, and I wrote you letters, and it took about a week for a letter to get from New York to Charlottesville. So I was struck by how little progress we’ve made.

[LAUGHTER]

JOANNE: And we were kind of talking about intellectual things, too.

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: Yes, we were.

JOANNE: Now these letters are about all sorts of things. They talk about philosophy, their families. Both complain about the indignities of old age. John Adams actually has a great sense of humor that he lets creep into these letters from time to time, and my favorite example of that is how he signs off one letter. He signs it, “In the 89th year of his age, still too fat to last much longer.”

[LAUGHTER]

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: One of the things about that that I love is he has a sense of the ridiculous, and he’s delighted to play with it, even if it makes fun of himself.

BRIAN: It sounds like these letters ended up being kind of a self-portrait of the artists as ex-presidents, so to speak. Did they talk seriously about politics, or is it all jokes and philosophy?

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: They occasionally reference politics in their correspondence. They occasionally will kick around an issue together. And every now and then, the sitting president will write to all the ex-presidents to ask for their advice. But they’re very careful not to get too much involved. They think of themselves as retired. And I think at one point, John Adams even uses the metaphor, “We’re old men and we will look silly buckling on our political armor to go into battle again.”

JOANNE: They’re far more concerned about the future, about posterity generally, and about how posterity will think of them.

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: They are both obsessed with that question.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I mean, one of the central themes of the correspondence is did we do right? Have we got a legacy that we are passing on to posterity? What will they think of what we did?

I mean, they’re like the Roman god Janus. They’re looking backward and forward at the same time. They really, really want to take the long view and to understand the significance of what they had done in the larger course of history. And I think learning that perspective and learning that balance is really important, and I think it’s a legacy that Adams and Jefferson both tried to leave us.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lincoln’s Body

BackStory host emeritus Peter Onuf talks to historian Richard Wightman Fox about the reaction to Lincoln’s funeral train as it crossed the country from Washington to his final resting place in Springfield, Illinois.

Music:

Csm by Podington Bear

Abraham Lincoln; funerals; presidents

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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NATHAN: Today on the show, in honor of President’s Day, we’ll explore the afterlives of presidents, what they do when they’re out of office, and the way we think about them through the ages.

BRIAN: We’ll hear from a collector of presidential memorabilia about what campaign tchotchkes can tell us about a presidency. We’ll look at how Ulysses S. Grant’s reputation has changed over time. Plus, the three of us will make our arguments for when post-presidencies became a thing, and who’s had the best second act.

But first, let’s go back to 1865. One of the most extraordinary stories of how a president’s reputation changed after the White House starts with the final journey of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had been a divisive figure in life. He’d been unpopular enough that he worried he would lose the presidency in the election of 1864. It wasn’t an unfounded fear. Even as the war began to turn decisively in the North’s favor, nearly half of white Northerners voted against him.

NATHAN: But after his death, those feelings changed. Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin Stanton took charge of funeral arrangements in Washington, DC, but Stanton also knew that people around the country were clamoring to visit the departed president. There was a week of public viewing in the capitol. Then, an elaborate funeral procession took Lincoln’s body for public viewing in 11 other US cities. The casket traveled by train all the way back to Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois.

Lincoln’s last journey lasted nearly two weeks, something made possible by new embalming practices introduced during the Civil War. All along the route, Americans lined up to pay tribute in an unprecedented spectacle of public mourning. An estimated 1 million people saw the body and 7 million saw the train pass by. That amounted to a third of the entire Northern population at the time.

A few years ago, BackStory host emeritus Peter Onuf sat down with historian Richard Wightman Fox to discuss the very public final journey of President Lincoln.

RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX: Everybody wanted their children to see all of this. They wanted to pass this event on through time, and by bringing their kids, making sure that they saw the body also. This is true of blacks and whites in all of these Northern cities. And when they are interviewed by journalists at the time, they keep saying, I want my children to see this.

PETER ONUF: You mentioned African-Americans being part of those audiences.

RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX: Yes.

PETER ONUF: So that was something new too, wasn’t it? It was a new claim on public space, would you say?

RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX: Yes. Yes and no. I think in East Coast cities, Baltimore, Philadelphia, especially, there was already a well-established black presence in public.

PETER ONUF: Right.

RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX: Right. But in the Midwest especially, one gets evidence in several places in which black people say at the time, this is new and different. We have never been welcomed into a public space as we have now been welcomed in the Lincoln funeral events. That is such an important story.

I think the fact that black men especially say in print in 1865, before this, we always felt we were just inviting a beating to go out in public. But here in the funeral events, we have been welcomed. It’s a completely different atmosphere in those places.

And we have lots of evidence from the actual funeral episodes that black people were overrepresented according to their numbers in the population in the crowds walking by the body, and they also mourned differently. They mourned volubly. And white people who talked to reporters say often, we wish we white people could show our emotions about this as easily as our black neighbors do.

PETER ONUF: And so when African-Americans saw Lincoln, saw the train, participated in this mourning period, this was consolidating a position they thought they had earned with their lives, with their sacrifices during the war.

RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX: Completely right, yes. That brings up the idea of the body politic, which is that entity which includes all citizens. And Lincoln is the man who pushed hardest to defend his idea of a body politic in which there was no distinction between the leader and the led. He wanted everybody to feel they were equal. And therefore, he called himself the representative man of this particular moment when he was chosen as the chief magistrate. He wasn’t better or superior. He was just temporarily the leader.

And that body politic implicitly by the end of his life included African-Americans. That’s what led John Wilkes Booth to kill him. It was that Lincoln was going to get rid of the hierarchy between monarch and people, and he was going get rid of the hierarchy between white and black.

PETER ONUF: So Richard, the train, which is a new mode of transportation, enables a trip like this. But what’s the point of the trip? If he’s dead, let’s just put him away. Why did Stanton think it was so important to pay so much attention to the body? Why is there this big– you have to call it a kind of spectacle, isn’t it?

RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX: Oh, it’s certainly a spectacle, and it’s a spiritual as well as secular event in the sense that people are still trying to figure out what this man meant to them. They realize that the assassination had catapulted him into a new stratosphere of importance for them. And he became, in effect, cosmically important, not just a national hero– but he would have been that without the assassination. He would have been this Republican hero who gave up his body.

He withered in office beyond anything that anyone had witnessed before. We had photography now recording his facial wrinkles. The famous Alexander Gardner image of him in February 1865 looking like he’s really ready to drop. And people at the time said that. They said, he looks horrible. We are afraid he’s going to die in office just of fatigue.

PETER ONUF: Richard, how would Lincoln had considered, if he could have considered, the public display of his body after his death?

RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX: I love that question. I love thinking about how Lincoln would have responded to this long funeral train. Would he have minded his body being put on display and deteriorating before the very eyes of the American people? And the more I think about it, the more I think he wouldn’t have minded at all. If there was one person in 19th century America who would not have minded his body deteriorating in public, I think it would have been Lincoln.

His whole point, this zealous Republican wanted to be with the people always. He jumped into crowds. And I think myself that by the end of his life, he had demonstrated, especially with his walk through Richmond on April 4, 1865, that he was not to be taken as a coward in any respect. He would gladly give up his life if that’s what it took to protect the republic. And for him, the republic meant a place where leaders congregate openly with the led.

And so here after death, he, I think, would have been very glad to be treated as a corpse in public, and for his body to go right down into dust. I think for him, that would have been almost the perfect denouement.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NATHAN: Richard Wightman Fox is a Professor of History at the University of Southern California, and author of Lincoln’s Body– a Cultural History. BackStory host Peter Onuf interviewed him for our episode on Lincoln’s assassination. Earlier in the show, we also heard from Richard Bernstein of the City College of New York. He’s the author of The Founding Fathers Reconsidered.

Presidential Memorabilia

Brian talks presidential campaign swag with Political Junkie podcast host, and former NPR Politics editor, Ken Rudin.

Music:

Gizmo by Podington Bear

collection; presidents

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

BRIAN: Modern political campaigns generate a lot of stuff, t-shirts, buttons, baseball caps. And for some of these campaigns, the memorabilia lasts longer than the memories. I have my own collection of presidential memorabilia. So what do we learn from the detritus spawned by our democratic process? Ken Rudin runs the Political Junkie Podcast, and we’re very fortunate to have him here today. Ken, welcome to BackStory.

KEN RUDIN: Thank you so much, Brian.

BRIAN: I want to know when presidential candidates started giving out stuff, stuff that became memorabilia.

KEN RUDIN: Well, going back to George Washington, when I was really young, they had tokens, and ribbons, and things like that. And often, the kind of tokens that you would sew onto your clothing.

Then, it wasn’t until 1896– that was the William McKinley versus William Jennings Bryan campaign– that that’s where the actual buttons started. But before that, it was tokens, and ribbons, and things clothing related.

And a lot of them had slogans on them talking about slavery, and tariffs, and things like that. But the word “buttons,” we didn’t know them until 1896.

BRIAN: I’ve always wondered what preceded the bumper sticker. Were there carriage stickers?

[LAUGHTER]

KEN RUDIN: You know, it’s funny. There’s so many dishonest collectors and people who try to swindle you. You always know that if somebody’s trying to spout, offer a bumper sticker before there were cars, you know there’s something suspicious about that.

[LAUGHTER]

Most people don’t collect bumper stickers, but I have a great collection of it. Like, I have a one that says, “This car is solid Goldwater,” things like that.

BRIAN: Oh, I love it.

KEN RUDIN: “Don’t blame me. The driver of this car voted for Stevenson.” So sometimes, stickers can be clever. Usually other than that, it’s just like, “Nixon’s the one,” and “all the way with LBJ.” But sometimes, they can be clever.

BRIAN: Well, how long have you been collecting memorabilia?

KEN RUDIN: Well, I started in 1966 when I was six months old. And back then in 1966, I would write to all the candidates running for governor and senator that year. So I would write to George Romney, and Nelson Rockefeller, and George Wallace, and Pat Brown, and California, Ronald Reagan. And by the end of the campaign, at the end of the ’66 campaign, I filled a shoe box filled with buttons. I couldn’t believe how many buttons I had.

And matter of fact, one of my favorite letters was when I wrote the governor Ronald Reagan, who was running for governor for the first time in 1966. I got a letter saying, hey, here’s your button, and I hope you enjoy it. Sincerely, Edwin Meese, who later became the attorney general. So you never knew that Edwin Meese got his start by giving out campaign buttons for Ronald Reagan.

BRIAN: Well, we have to start somewhere in politics, Ken.

KEN RUDIN: That’s right, exactly.

BRIAN: Well, Ken, I’m pouring out some of my campaign buttons. I have to say my favorite set is the set that a former graduate student gave to me, and it is pro-Nixon buttons, but it’s Hungarians for Nixon, and Irish for Nixon. Nixon, as you know better than anybody, made an appeal to white ethnic groups. And man, I didn’t know there were ever so many white ethnic groups as I have buttons.

KEN RUDIN: Well, I have that said. And actually, Ronald Reagan duplicated that in 1980. There’s also all those nationalities for Reagan as well. And they’re kind of great, but they’re not the first to do that.

Barry Goldwater came out with a bunch of buttons. There are picture buttons of Barry Goldwater and his running mate William Miller, who was a congressman from upstate New York, and in about 50 different languages. Some would say Goldwater Miller, which was English. But then it would be all those other language, some of them that if you didn’t look at the curl of the button, you’d have no idea in the world what language they were. And that was always fun.

BRIAN: You’d think that after Goldwater’s performance they would have stopped those ethnic buttons.

KEN RUDIN: Well, I believe there were more Goldwater buttons than they got votes. That’s for sure, considering he only won six states in 1964 against Lyndon Johnson.

BRIAN: Which president had the best memorabilia?

KEN RUDIN: The best memorabilia. Well, something, you have to go back. Back in the old days– and of course, id’ be even before I was born, and that’s going back a long, long time– some of the McKinley buttons in 1896 and 1900, the colors were just magnificent. They were multicolored and all caricatures.

Well for example, I have this William Howard Taft button from 1908, and it’s a caricature of Taft inside maybe it’s a Model T Ford, because obviously, cars were new then. But it’s an inch of a quarter in size. But the colors of it are magnificent. And it says “From Chicago to DC,” basically from the convention to the nation’s capital. And you see Taft in this little automobile with multiple colors.

Maybe it’s just so simplistic in its beauty and innocent in its beauty. You know, it’s not a simple slogan but. They really put a lot of interest and effort into it, and it’s just stunning stuff. And sometimes, I’ll look at these things and say, boy, they sure don’t make them like they used to.

BRIAN: And what do you think people collect these? What is it about presidential memorabilia?

KEN RUDIN: Well, certainly that’s a good question. And I think it reminds me of why people collect baseball cards. When I was a kid, I collected baseball cards because I just loved baseball. And when I started collecting–

BRIAN: It wasn’t for the chewing gum?

KEN RUDIN: Well, OK, I’ll just tell you a great story about chewing gum quickly. 1972, I go into Nixon and McGovern headquarters, and I bought a box of 50 or 100 Nixon bubble gum cigars and McGovern bubblegum cigars for my collection, but I wound up eating all of them within a day or two. That was not smart. I think my dentist was very happy, but that’s about it.

But I think if you love politics and you love the history of politics, you can just– what I do often, which is because I’m very lonely– but I’ll just look at some of my collection of the Willkie campaign, or the Truman stuff, or Eisenhower. I mean, I have “I Like Ike” sunglasses. I have “I like Ike” license plate attachments.

They were clever, and they were beautiful. And it reminds me of a day long gone in politics. So I think it reminds me the same reason baseball fans collected baseball cards, I think Political Junkie just love presidential campaign buttons.

BRIAN: So what’s so attractive about the politics of yore? There was lots of corruption. Lots of people weren’t even eligible to vote.

KEN RUDIN: You know, that’s a great question. I think I have a feeling that a lot of people in any kind of walk of life, whether you’re talking about baseball, or politics, or business, or entertainment, everybody goes back to the golden days because they’re not happy with what’s going on now. And you’re absolutely right, there was corruption back there, Warren Harding with Teapot Dome, and all the racism that went on, the open racism now.

But at least now, it seems to be a time where people are not talking to each other. People are yelling at each other. It’s us against them. And sure, George was controversial, and sure, other candidates in the past were controversial. We could talk about Richard Nixon’s southern strategy and things like that.

But I still think that there was a decency in our candidates, a decency in our political system that sadly, we’re not seeing as much today, and I don’t know how we get that back. Maybe the only way to get it back is to go collect old campaign buttons.

[LAUGHTER]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: Ken Rudin is host of the Political Junkie Podcast Ken, thanks so much for joining us on BackStory today.

KEN RUDIN: Brian, it was my absolute pleasure. I really enjoyed it.

American Ulysses

Brian interviews historian David Blight about the ups and downs of Ulysses S. Grant’s reputation.

Music:

Sad moments by Ketsa

Ulysses S. Grant; presidents; reputation

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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BRIAN: Today, we’ve been talking about the afterlife of presidents, what they do when they’re out of office, and how we think about them once they’re gone. If there’s one president Americans have been arguing about since pretty much the moment he left office in 1877, it’s Ulysses S. Grant. So we called up a friend of the show, David Blight, to talk about how Grant’s reputation has changed over time.

Blight’s been reading and reviewing the latest crop of Grant biographies for the New York Review of Books, and he says there’s one thing all Grant’s many biographers can agree on. Before the Civil War, Grant’s reputation wasn’t even up for debate.

DAVID BLIGHT: Grant was by any measure near complete failure in life in the 1850s.

JOANNE: He’s not kidding. Grant had gone to West Point as a young man and had a solid, if unexceptional, early career in the army. He fought in the Mexican-American war and married well, but he also developed a drinking problem and ultimately resigned his commission. Soon, he found himself taking a succession of odd jobs and struggling to support his growing family.

BRIAN: There’s a scene of him. He ends up selling wood on street corners, basically?

DAVID BLIGHT: Yeah, he ended up in a–

BRIAN: This sounds like something out of The Wire.

DAVID BLIGHT: I know. I know, yeah. This, you can’t make this up. He ends up selling wood, firewood, in an old faded blue army coat on streets of St. Louis in the late 1850s. He’s a true nobody and a failure who becomes virtually everything.

NATHAN: Grant, of course, went on to become the general who led the Union Army to victory over the Confederacy. He was elected president not once, but twice. And during his presidency, he established the Department of Justice to preserve the civil rights of newly emancipated black citizens and suppress the emerging Ku Klux Klan. But his record as both a general and a president is a mixed one.

During the war, he developed a reputation as a battlefield butcher, willing to wage total war regardless of southern casualties or the survival of his own men. And as president, his name also became synonymous with corruption and scandal.

DAVID BLIGHT: He got overwhelmed, caught in the crosshairs, tangled by these various scandals. And there are four, five, six of them right on through his second term. And frankly–

BRIAN: Which of these scandals did the most damage to his reputation?

DAVID BLIGHT: Gosh, they all did. Maybe the whiskey ring, actually.

BRIAN: So many scandals, so little time.

DAVID BLIGHT: There were. But let’s just say the whiskey ring was this amazing cartel. I guess it wouldn’t surprise us today that much, but an amazing cartel set up by members of the federal government and then Congress people, cabinet officials were in on the take. It was all about stealing the money from excised taxes paid on whiskey.

BRIAN: And what was Grant’s culpability in all of this, David?

DAVID BLIGHT: A couple of his own relatives were in on it, like a brother and a brother-in-law.

BRIAN: As Grant left office in a cloud of scandal, he and his wife Julia left Washington. The question was, what came next?

DAVID BLIGHT: Well, Brian, that’s a fascinating part of the Grant story, because at the end of his second term, he is embattled with this reputation of scandal, and the Republican Party was embattled with it, no question. And Democrats are running headlong against it every way they can. It’s called Grantism. They just run against Grantism.

But there are also a lot of Republicans who wanted him to run again. And let’s remember there was no amendment requiring two terms then, but he did not run. And the handwriting was on the wall, the Republicans needed somebody knew. They needed somebody relatively unknown, and they found one in Rutherford B Hayes.

And then what Grant does, it’s amazing. He has this huge burden of celebrity and fame, and it really was. There was this phenomenon when the presidency was over that was called Grant mania. Grant couldn’t go anywhere, the classic paparazzi celebrity problem.

And when he leaves the presidency, he doesn’t have much money. Rich people started giving him houses. Seriously, I don’t know. There were six or seven of them, and he was given a house in Philadelphia. He was given a house in New Jersey. He was eventually given a house in the Upper East Side of New York.

And so he and Julia decided to go on a world tour. They went all over Europe. They went down to the Mediterranean. They went to part of the Middle East. They went to Asia. They went to China and Japan. And everywhere, they went they were feted in grandeur by heads of state, by monarchs, kings, queens.

BRIAN: So David, why is this? What was it about Grant that made him so attractive to the paparazzi?

DAVID BLIGHT: Again, frankly, I think it was the General Grant, because he still gets called–

BRIAN: Because it was General Grant.

DAVID BLIGHT: He still gets called General Grant, even on the world tour, who had also been president. Let’s not forget, but it was the General Grant. And I think Chernow’s book in particular is good on this. He shows how there was just this hunger for a hero in the 19th century, and Grant just fit the bill.

A silent man, a bit of an enigma. You can’t entirely understand him, but by God, he defeated the South. And if you could just overlook some of the stuff in his presidency, you had the real thing here, an American hero, a guy from nowhere who was nobody who became everything.

But anyway, it comes back. It’s about 1878, 1879. Now, he’s only got five, six years to live, as we know, but he didn’t know that. And he sets himself up as this kind of increasingly rich famous Gilded Age gentleman living on the Upper East Side of New York, and he was just going to live into retirement and get rich until his entire fortune was destroyed in this Ponzi scheme, and he ends up utterly broke.

And then, of course, decides to write the memoirs, which become the greatest deathbed writing in American letters, the most famous, perhaps, military autobiography ever written. Grant finished those memoirs as he was dying of throat cancer when he couldn’t really even speak anymore and he could hardly even eat anymore. And the two volumes of the Grant memoirs made Grant’s family back something in the neighborhood of $450,000 almost overnight.

It’s a heroic literary story that Grant goes out with, which is yet another reason– let’s face it– that biographers are attracted to him. Because this was the soldier, the general, the great strategist who not only became president– and you know, maybe we can say wasn’t that successful as a president.

BRIAN: Sure.

DAVID BLIGHT: But in the end, he’s actually known for his writing.

BRIAN: How did those memoirs change Grant’s legacy?

DAVID BLIGHT: Oh, good question. From that day forward, he dies and the memoirs are published within a month or two. They sold like crazy. They were sold by– part of the story’s very moving– union veterans volunteered– sometimes were hired, but volunteered to go door to door around the country selling subscriptions for the two volumes of the Grant memoirs.

So it became a kind of a GAR, a Grand Army of the Republic tribute to Grant. And hundreds of thousands of people, of course, bought the book, probably read it. Or even if they didn’t read it, you had to have Grant’s memoirs on your shelf.

But what happens to Grant’s legacy is interesting but the 20th century. By the 1890s, the whole civil war reconciliation story has really caught hold. The Union of North and South, the denying of the war being about slavery, the power of this cultural force of the Lost Cause has really sunk in–

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

BRIAN: The demise of reconstruction.

DAVID BLIGHT: Exactly, and the celebration of the defeat of reconstruction–

BRIAN: Right.

DAVID BLIGHT: Which is Grant’s presidency. So in a sense, Grant won the war, but he was defeated in reconstruction. And by the early 20th century, it’s the historical moment for what, at least a couple of decades, of the development of the Robert E. Lee cult. It’s that period when so many of the Confederate monuments that we’ve recently been arguing about were all put up and built.

And for decades, Grant was not ignored. There were a few books on him here and there. But Grant, he didn’t vanish, but he kind of was put aside in American memory during this year of the Lost Cause, that Lee cult, and a time when you had to look hard to know that abolitionists had any role in the Civil War here except for causing the war.

BRIAN: Much has been made about the Jefferson-Hamilton teeter totter seesaw, if you will. Is it right to put Lee at the other end of the seesaw with Grant sitting on it?

DAVID BLIGHT: Oh, I think so. Well, first by the military historians, for sure. This is an old debate. Who was the better general? Who was the better tactician? Who was the better strategist, and so forth and so on.

But I do think you do have a seesaw here in the sense that the Grant revival now is showing us that we’re writing about a different civil war. It’s is not your granddaddy’s civil war anymore as it was in the blue versus the gray of the Civil War centennial. It’s the war to save the Union, but it’s especially the war that ended slavery and then reinvented the American republic.

And if that’s the Civil War you’ve come to write about, you’ve come to learn about, you’ve come to believe in, then Grant’s story’s right there at the heart of it all. He’s a thread all the way through it.

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NATHAN: David Blight is Professor of American History at Yale University. You can catch his review of two of the newest biographies of Grant in the New York Review of Books.

Who Did It Best?

Joanne, Nathan, and Brian consider how the post-presidency became prominent, as well as which ex-president had the best second act in American history.

presidents; reputation

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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BRIAN: One of the questions that comes up a lot these days is, what are presidents going to do after the presidency? I want to have a little competition here, and here’s the game. When did the post-presidency become a thing?

JOANNE: OK, a thing.

NATHAN: Gosh.

JOANNE: I mean, I can throw a pitch in to the game.

BRIAN: Of course.

JOANNE: I don’t know if I want to argue that John Quincy Adams makes it a thing, but he’s the first president that has a really prominent post-president career.

NATHAN: Right.

JOANNE: John Quincy Adams, he and John Adams are the only one-termers. And then he basically isn’t done with public life. There’s things he still wants to do. He ends up– I don’t think this was his plan, but he ends up being elected not to the Senate, but to the House

NATHAN: Right.

JOANNE: And being an ex-president and the descendant of a founder in the House of Representatives, you–

BRIAN: Yeah, how did that work?

JOANNE: Yeah, you become a really powerful guy.

NATHAN: Right, right.

JOANNE: That means something if you’re going to go up against John Quincy Adams. So that gave him some added clout.

NATHAN: Yeah. I think the Adams case in particular was one where you, I think, would say you see the real power symbolically of the president to do things in other realms of political life. So not simply about retiring to one’s estate, but still having platform, credibility.

John Quincy Adams becomes a very verbal anti-slavery advocate in a way that is easier as a congressman than even as a president. He’s not abolishing slavery during the time that he’s President of the United States, but he’s advocating for an end of slavery by the time he gets to the House.

And so I think there is a way that you can look at the Quincy Adams moment as one in which at least the symbolic power of the president gets converted into some kind of political capital to continue to be about the governing of the country.

BRIAN: OK, well, maybe it’s the bureaucrat in me. But when I think of a thing, I think of a thing that’s kind of going to continue, or at least happen more often than not, or maybe just more than one. So my problem with– and we haven’t said who’s judging this competition– but my problem with Quincy Adams thing is–

JOANNE: It’s not a thing.

BRIAN: I don’t see what happens with the next president, Andrew Jackson.

JOANNE: Right. Right, no.

NATHAN: Right, right, right.

JOANNE: It is not a thing with Andrew Jackson.

NATHAN: Right. And there are a lot of extenuating circumstances about life expectancy and what people are willing to do, how public people actually are. Even the notion of a celebrity is still very much in the making in the 19th century, in an American sense.

This is certainly the case that people have made for Ulysses S. Grant. It is Grant, by many accounts, who is seen as being probably the first really prominent post-president helping to create a public persona that is different from simply the fact of him having been president.

BRIAN: But isn’t he a one-off also?

NATHAN: I wouldn’t say in the same way. Because if you think about a kind of long 20th century, there are many ways in which the memoiring president becomes a real feature of what becomes the office and what it–

BRIAN: Interesting.

NATHAN: –means going forward.

BRIAN: Interesting.

NATHAN: Now, you get to the point where, of course, it’s presumed that every president will have a memoir after they leave office, and that has a lot to do with the genre really being inaugurated by Grant.

BRIAN: That’s really cool. So you’re saying that Grant created that template of securing one’s legacy by writing– well, in Grant’s case, a really brilliant memoir.

JOANNE: So I’ll toss in, though, that what we’re talking about with grant is a public-minded persona. That if you go all the way back– I mean, Washington doesn’t live very long. But if you’re looking at Adams, and Jefferson, and Madison, they spend years after their presidency organizing their papers very carefully–

NATHAN: That’s true. That’s true.

JOANNE: So that they’re presenting themselves to posterity. It’s just in a sense, a different kind of memoir.

BRIAN: Well, I’m going to make a case for doing, not just writing or organizing. And I’m putting my money as a thing on the Teddy Roosevelt-Taft combo, right?

JOANNE: Oh, the combo.

BRIAN: The combo.

[LAUGHTER]

Right? It’s a thing because there’s more than one of them.

NATHAN: OK, great.

BRIAN: But you’ve got a very dynamic president in Teddy Roosevelt. Many scholars would say he created or began to create the modern presidency, certainly the 20th century presidency, active president, believed in executive authority, et cetera, et cetera.

Leaves the presidency after those two terms, but then comes back and runs in 1912 in one of the most exciting elections in American history. He doesn’t win, but Roosevelt was very active after he was president. In fact, a lot of people thought that he had a good chance of becoming president again in 1912.

Now, Taft, he leaves the presidency and then becomes Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a pretty important position.

And so I’m arguing that the combination of the rise of the modern president, especially being very important in ongoing foreign relations with these two guys back to back who either run for a very important position, the president again, or hold a very important position, that kind of shapes notions of the possibility of these very important guys doing pretty important things even after they’re president. That’s it. I got nothing else.

JOANNE: But that makes sense, right?

NATHAN: It does. It does.

JOANNE: Because the office itself changes. That’s part of what you’re saying here, which is totally true. But the 20th century presidency is a very different thing from the 19th century presidency.

NATHAN: Yes, yes.

JOANNE: And so they take that persona and that authority with them, which as you’re suggesting, they can then deploy in a conscious kind of a way that maybe their predecessors couldn’t.

I do have a question, though, that relates to this. And part of maybe a switch on the thing that we’re looking for would be not just presidents with post-presidency careers, but presidents who are better as post-presidents, right?

BRIAN: And that’s a great question. I got my candidate. I’ve got my candidate. But I–

JOANNE: I want to hear.

BRIAN: –wanna hear from you guys. No, I want to hear from you guys first.

NATHAN: You’re such a brown-noser, Brian. Oh my god.

BRIAN: I am. I am. But I want to hear from you guys first. I want to hear from you guys first just so I can trump you.

JOANNE: I mean, it’s a one-off. It’s a one-off.

BRIAN: And Trump is not my candidate, by the way.

JOANNE: No. John Quincy Adams was, but he’s, like, by himself there as a guy who was much better in Congress than he was as president.

NATHAN: Right. Well, I mean, this one, this is kind of a give me. So forgive me, Brian, if I end up stealing your answer, but it’s got to be Jimmy Carter.

BRIAN: Yes, yes. Two to one. Two to one, the 20th century–

JOANNE: No, even I was going to say that’s the first thing that comes to mind. But as a not 20th century person, I figured that I could jump in with Jimmy Carter.

BRIAN: OK, so Nathan, why are we right?

NATHAN: OK, OK. So obviously, Carter had a lot of problems as a one-term president, and it had a lot to do with–

BRIAN: Right, so being really bad is one of the keys here as president.

NATHAN: As president, it helps. It also helps that Jimmy Carter is, again, very long-lived. We’re lucky to still have him as someone who is also very vocal and really overt in his declarations about human rights. He is a very avid opinion maker in the realm of foreign policy.

And one last necessary plug, I think, for Carter as the greatest post-president president, I guess I would say, is that it really has changed the game for all of his subsequent post-presidents in so far as he has the Carter Center, which becomes this amazing philanthropic organization. You can think about in the mid-1980s when it’s established. It goes after eradicating Guinea worm and succeeds in saving the lives of millions of people.

You think about Bush and Clinton aligning themselves, Bush one and Clinton aligning themselves to fundraise on behalf of anti-poverty measures. You think about the way that presidents are basically making very prominent appearances together in public to fundraise for hurricanes across the world. Again, it’s just one more example, earthquakes and the like. And all of this is done through these various philanthropies.

And so again, I think it’s a combination of the dismantling of certain kinds of social services making philanthropy more necessary and these nonprofits more necessary. But that presidents themselves rise to that shift in the political culture and begin to imagine themselves as spokespeople of these various foundations.

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JOANNE: That’s going to do it for today, but you can keep the conversation going online let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about American history. You’ll find us at BackStoryRadio.org, or send an email to BackStory at Virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at BackStory Radio. And if you like the show, feel free to review it in Apple Podcasts. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

BRIAN: This episode of BackStory was produced by David Stenhouse, Nina Earnest, Emily Gadek, and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Millner is our technical director, Diana Williams is our digital editor, and Joey Thompson is our researcher.

Additional help came from [INAUDIBLE], Sequoia Carillo, Courtney [? Sponya ?] and Aaron Teeling. Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from Ketza, Podington Bear, and [? Jazaar. ?] And as always, thanks to the Johns Hopkins studios in Baltimore.

NATHAN: BackStory’s produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost Office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

MALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Windham for Virginia Humanities.