Wars within a War: Controversy and Conflict over the American Civil War

The Nation's Greatest Hero Should Rest in the Nation's Greatest City

The Nation’s Greatest Hero Should Rest in the Nation’s Greatest City  JOAN WAUGH  Before it was the General Grant National Memorial it was officially called Grant Monument. Visitors dubbed it “Grant’s Tomb,” and the nickname stuck. Commanding a hill 270 feet above the Hudson River on the north end of Manhattan’s Riverside Park, the 160-foot gleaming granite and marble structure is one of the most impressive Civil War monuments ever built and the largest mausoleum in North America. Opened with great fanfare on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Grant’s birthday on April 27, 1897, and funded entirely by popular subscription, the neoclassical building was designed to inspire awe. “His grave, his monument, his fame,” predicted a contemporary, “will transcend all other attractions.” Another predicted that people would forever learn “lessons of patriotism and fidelity from his monument.”1 Grant’s Tomb quickly became a sacred pilgrimage spot for Union veterans and their families from all over the country. Many thousands gathered for regularly scheduled ceremonies honoring Grant’s birthday, Memorial Day, and the Fourth of July. Prominent politicians and presidents selected the spot for speeches and important announcements. Foreign dignitaries visited frequently to pay their respects. Until 1916 it remained New York’s most visited monument, drawing 500,000–600,000 people annually, outdistancing the Statue of Liberty, and maintaining extremely high levels of visitation until 1929.2 That year, aged survivors of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the North’s most powerful veteran organization, conducted their final ceremony at the tomb. The veterans, their families, and their immediate descendants declined in number after 1929, and the monument languished. Attendance dropped dramatically through the decades. Where the monument once stood alone, new additions to the area, including the towering Gothic Riverside Church, crowded it out, diminishing its presence. The lovely and remote rural park in which it was placed in the 1890s turned 250  Joan Waugh into a dangerous crime-ridden neighborhood, called Morningside Heights, in the 1960s and 1970s. Additionally, the structure designed to summon feelings of reverence and contemplation seemed old-fashioned and ugly to modern sensibilities. One critic called it “clumsy and tasteless,” while another described it as “pompous beyond even the requirements of a Mausoleum for a national hero.”3 The Grant Monument Association, the private organization responsible for its upkeep, could not raise enough money to stop the building’s deterioration. Nor did the situation change when the National Park Service took over the monument’s care in 1958. By 1988, one scholar wrote that Grant’s Tomb was the “least appreciated national monument in the country.” Another observer was more graphic, calling it a “graffiti-scarred hangout for drug dealers and muggers.”4 The defaced monument offered little to the casual history buff.Unlike other important National Park sites, there was no visitor’s center to interpret Grant’s career, and no restrooms to accommodate tourist comfort. As interest in Civil War sites increased in the 1990s, due in part to Ken Burn’s PBS documentary The Civil War, the monument’s decay became a minor, and then a major scandal. Frank Scaturro , a Columbia University student volunteer at the tomb, went public with a scathing report charging neglect and abuse by the federal government that in turn generated media interest.5 A 1994 NewYorkTimes editorial , titled “Dishonor for a Hero President,” enumerated a sad list of woes that had befallen the tomb and called for the National Park Service to redress what had become a scandal attracting widespread attention.6 Family descendants, led by Ulysses S. Grant Dietz, the great-great-grandson of Postcard of the Grant Monument, circa 1906. Author’s collection. 251  THE NATION ’ S GREATEST HERO Grant, threatened to remove his body from NewYork City and re-inter his remains (along with those of his wife, Julia) in Illinois, when that state’s legislature offered a burial place. In a Manhattan courtroom, the family charged that the tomb was “neglected and being abused by graffiti writers, skateboarders who use its stairs as a ramp, drug users and homeless people who urinate on the monument’s wall.” Responding to a chorus of protests, the Park Service embarked on a $1.8 million restoration project finished in time for the 100th anniversary commemoration of the monument’s opening on April 27, 1997.7 Despite the improvements, Grant’s Tomb remains a largely...